Hamlet. Oedipus Rex. The one about the traveling salesman. Good stories are worth telling again and again. Some are epics, some a few sentences, but when told well they're worth repeating.
On the other hand: domesticated witch in suburbia; redneck brothers in a perpetual demolition derby; crime-fighting team of supermodels. These aren't stories, but premises. And premises don't, by themselves, deserve re-telling. Start a tale, "So this guy comes back from the dead and gets this crime-fighting, talking car" and the listener waits for the rest: "So?" A premise is only an outline. (Admittedly, a premise sells tickets. "A lost man finds himself by helping others" isn't easy to put on a poster. A sleek black Corvette is.)
When we're lucky, a la The Fugitive, familiar premises in movies are infused with imagination and structure. When they're not, they amount to childish imitation. Our acceptance and enjoyment of these, then, is merely a wistful nostalgia, a memory in soft-focus; we ignore their trashy, throwaway origins — the very thing that made them passable in the first place. Once innocent genre exercises, in their new incarnations they must pretend to transcendence, and so collapse under the weight of big budgets and boundless hubris.
Of course, that's a big part of their appeal, the movies: spectacle and bombast. They've always promised marvelous premises. And now they can realize them so fully. All barriers have been removed, nothing is beyond their reach. No bait-and-switch, no men in rubber suits knocking over plastic models: when we see the trailers and hear the taglines, we know we'll get what we're promised. We buy our ticket and wait to be delighted and surprised.
What we want from the movies is the best of both worlds: a great premise plus the elements of a classic, ageless story. King Kong promises both. Pick your subtext— racial, sexual, environmental —or chalk it up to inter-species identification; whatever the fascination, it's real. The big guy's got us.
And never like he does here. Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis and a small army of technicians have triumphed in their creation of an animal, emotional, pitiful monster. At every moment he is credible. He's the most sympathetic special effect since E.T.
The human end of the equation holds up, too. Not since Bob Hoskins played second-fiddle to a cartoon rabbit has anyone acted opposite air as well as Naomi Watts. All the actors are good, even the usually-comic Jack Black.
Jackson & co.'s most interesting choice is to make filmmaker Carl Denham into a headstrong auteur (perhaps even a doppelganger for our esteemed director?). Unfortunately, the script doesn't take this to its logical, dramatic extent. The premise has not so much been expanded as it has been inflated, as if Kong has to answer to hobbits, elves, and wizards.
And so it goes: every element from the original 1933 film, save Kong himself, seems to have been blown up to several times its size and then left to twist in the wind. The story's logical leaps and repeated contrivances are glaring, even with belief suspended.
At the appointed time, Denham suddenly exchanges his quest for celluloid immortality for half-cocked showmanship. He transforms into P.T. Barnum mainly, it seems, to send the movie lurching into its perfunctory final act; as I was reminded, a stage-bound Kong is a ridiculous idea that's been already lampooned by The Simpsons, and there's no reason to repeat it here. With the end in sight, the movie stops trying entirely. The last twenty minutes play almost as an afterthought.
The first sixty? The most earnest, impressive exposition since, well, those epic fantasies of a couple Christmases ago. Only we're not on a quest to save a world from eternal darkness, but to an island with a mammoth monkey.
Once we're there, the movie is chock-full of every sight and sound you could wish for, and several that you wouldn't. Skull Island makes Jurassic Park look like a petting zoo; Peter Jackson can certainly show us more than we've ever imagined. But he doesn't seem to wonder if he should (shades of Jurassic Park, again). "I can, so I did," seems to be the guiding principle— whether it's offing his actors grotesquely, or depicting flyby video-game vistas, or concocting entire, secondary plot lines for uninteresting, secondary characters. Or using that fuzzy Nazgul-cam effect to underline scenes that he's afraid may not be compelling enough on their own. Or letting his menagerie dispatch nameless extras with less respect than he affords art-deco skyscrapers. What there is, is all too much.
Three hours is not, by definition, too long. Some stories demand lavish treatment. But a giant gorilla's romance with a waifish blond? That's 90-odd minutes. Stuffing a silly, thin premise full of superfluous stock characters and dozens of creepy-crawlies, and attempting to infuse it with a grandeur usually reserved for the passing of heads of state, only confirms that it should have stayed a tight, lean adventure yarn.
Little would have been lost had Mr. Jackson succeeded in making his version 9 years ago, before the unquestionable success of the Rings; the technological hurdles would have been higher, and many of the more expensive sequences and lavish period elements would have been sacrificed. He would not have been the world-beating director of theretofore unfilmable fantasy but a scrappy, homegrown horror schlockster. And King Kong could have been better for it.
Instead, this beast is destined to live on primarily as a great test-disc for high-definition televisions. Peter Jackson's King Kong is a perfectly realized premise in want of a ruthlessly efficient story.
On the other hand: domesticated witch in suburbia; redneck brothers in a perpetual demolition derby; crime-fighting team of supermodels. These aren't stories, but premises. And premises don't, by themselves, deserve re-telling. Start a tale, "So this guy comes back from the dead and gets this crime-fighting, talking car" and the listener waits for the rest: "So?" A premise is only an outline. (Admittedly, a premise sells tickets. "A lost man finds himself by helping others" isn't easy to put on a poster. A sleek black Corvette is.)
When we're lucky, a la The Fugitive, familiar premises in movies are infused with imagination and structure. When they're not, they amount to childish imitation. Our acceptance and enjoyment of these, then, is merely a wistful nostalgia, a memory in soft-focus; we ignore their trashy, throwaway origins — the very thing that made them passable in the first place. Once innocent genre exercises, in their new incarnations they must pretend to transcendence, and so collapse under the weight of big budgets and boundless hubris.
Of course, that's a big part of their appeal, the movies: spectacle and bombast. They've always promised marvelous premises. And now they can realize them so fully. All barriers have been removed, nothing is beyond their reach. No bait-and-switch, no men in rubber suits knocking over plastic models: when we see the trailers and hear the taglines, we know we'll get what we're promised. We buy our ticket and wait to be delighted and surprised.
What we want from the movies is the best of both worlds: a great premise plus the elements of a classic, ageless story. King Kong promises both. Pick your subtext— racial, sexual, environmental —or chalk it up to inter-species identification; whatever the fascination, it's real. The big guy's got us.
And never like he does here. Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis and a small army of technicians have triumphed in their creation of an animal, emotional, pitiful monster. At every moment he is credible. He's the most sympathetic special effect since E.T.
The human end of the equation holds up, too. Not since Bob Hoskins played second-fiddle to a cartoon rabbit has anyone acted opposite air as well as Naomi Watts. All the actors are good, even the usually-comic Jack Black.
Jackson & co.'s most interesting choice is to make filmmaker Carl Denham into a headstrong auteur (perhaps even a doppelganger for our esteemed director?). Unfortunately, the script doesn't take this to its logical, dramatic extent. The premise has not so much been expanded as it has been inflated, as if Kong has to answer to hobbits, elves, and wizards.
And so it goes: every element from the original 1933 film, save Kong himself, seems to have been blown up to several times its size and then left to twist in the wind. The story's logical leaps and repeated contrivances are glaring, even with belief suspended.
At the appointed time, Denham suddenly exchanges his quest for celluloid immortality for half-cocked showmanship. He transforms into P.T. Barnum mainly, it seems, to send the movie lurching into its perfunctory final act; as I was reminded, a stage-bound Kong is a ridiculous idea that's been already lampooned by The Simpsons, and there's no reason to repeat it here. With the end in sight, the movie stops trying entirely. The last twenty minutes play almost as an afterthought.
The first sixty? The most earnest, impressive exposition since, well, those epic fantasies of a couple Christmases ago. Only we're not on a quest to save a world from eternal darkness, but to an island with a mammoth monkey.
Once we're there, the movie is chock-full of every sight and sound you could wish for, and several that you wouldn't. Skull Island makes Jurassic Park look like a petting zoo; Peter Jackson can certainly show us more than we've ever imagined. But he doesn't seem to wonder if he should (shades of Jurassic Park, again). "I can, so I did," seems to be the guiding principle— whether it's offing his actors grotesquely, or depicting flyby video-game vistas, or concocting entire, secondary plot lines for uninteresting, secondary characters. Or using that fuzzy Nazgul-cam effect to underline scenes that he's afraid may not be compelling enough on their own. Or letting his menagerie dispatch nameless extras with less respect than he affords art-deco skyscrapers. What there is, is all too much.
Three hours is not, by definition, too long. Some stories demand lavish treatment. But a giant gorilla's romance with a waifish blond? That's 90-odd minutes. Stuffing a silly, thin premise full of superfluous stock characters and dozens of creepy-crawlies, and attempting to infuse it with a grandeur usually reserved for the passing of heads of state, only confirms that it should have stayed a tight, lean adventure yarn.
Little would have been lost had Mr. Jackson succeeded in making his version 9 years ago, before the unquestionable success of the Rings; the technological hurdles would have been higher, and many of the more expensive sequences and lavish period elements would have been sacrificed. He would not have been the world-beating director of theretofore unfilmable fantasy but a scrappy, homegrown horror schlockster. And King Kong could have been better for it.
Instead, this beast is destined to live on primarily as a great test-disc for high-definition televisions. Peter Jackson's King Kong is a perfectly realized premise in want of a ruthlessly efficient story.