Sometimes people do great work in a bad movie. Pioneering special effects makeup wizard Rick Baker probably did a man-in-a-gorilla-suit performance as well as it could be done.
If I recall, in the mid-1970’s more than one studio was vying to do a remake of King Kong. Universal wanted to make a movie using state-of-the-art (for 1975) model animation; wonder what that version would have been like?
So what was Fay Wraye in the original?
The most disappointing thing about the '70s version: Where are the dinosaurs?! What, that kind of budget and all you give us is one lousy giant snake?!
Are you kidding? Kong’s battle with the T-Rex’s in Jackson’s version beats the living hell out of anything in any version of Kong. Hell, the T-rexes and other giant lizards stalking Naomi were better than anything in any version of Kong. That whole sequence where Naomi gets stalked by the big lizard, to where Kong fights it out with the surviving T-Rex for Naomi, was worth the price of admission for the movie. I mean, the T-rex in the 1933 version and Kong himself looked like what they were … models being moved around. Jackson’s version of Kong and the T-rexes looked like really capable predators fighting for their lives. Or for a bite of Naomi Watts.
I thought the rest of Jackson’s remake was pretty good, too, right up to the point where Kong is taken off the island. But that’s the way I feel about every version of King Kong … after Kong leaves the island, the good part of the movie is over, and the rest is just a bunch of sentimental drivel.
I love the Peter Jackson version, though it does seem to go on forever. I just wish he’d cast a real actor as Denham instead of Jack Black. (And the way Kong was slinging Ann around while running through the jungle with her in his hand should have killed her.)
The 1933 version doesn’t work for me. The actors–except for Fay Wray–are wooden and the dialogue is atrocious. (“It wasn’t the airplanes…” is one of the dumbest lines in movie history.) Kong always looks like a rubber toy.
I Love the Original, and I Love Peter Jackson’s version. He did something original – re-interpreting the original version, yet being very faithful to it. Carl Denham isn’t the successful Hollywood producer/director who’s good buddies with Captain Englehorn and his Chief Mate Driscoll – he’s a scrambler, barely successful and on the edge of ruin, lying and conniving to get things done and fabulizing to himself to keep going. It makes his final line more significant and in character. The Venture is a falling-apart rust bucket, and Engelhorn the hard-bitten captain who doesn’t trust Denham (with good reason).
Kong is wonderfully realized, looking much more like a gorilla (and acting more like one) than in the original. I can’t understand those who denigrate the performance. The special effects are gorgeous (although there are a couple of times during the Brontosaur stampede where the combining of elements gets clumsy), and in most cases the matching and compositing is perfect. The original King Kong was state-of-the-art, with many new techniques invented for it, or extensively used for the first time (miniature rear-screen projection, extensive animating of the camera itself). This new version also pushes the boundaries of the form. The bi-planes look a helluva lot less stiff and miniature, and CGI allows the camera to wheel around, no longer bound to that static glass painting used in 1933 (although both versions are better than the shot-upwards-at-night-so-you-don’t-have-to-bother-with-a-background idiocy of the 1976 version. As if moving it to the World Trade Center by itself was an improvement)
Not at all.
I think that Jackson’s T-Rex fight, while certainly very kinetic, is so artificial and, in a way, insubstantial, as to drain it of all drama.
I don’t necessarily disagree that the '33 Kong and Rex look like models being manipulated, but I think that they look less like what they are than the '05 Kong and Rexes do - CGI models that can do a lot of tricks.
And while, again, I do find some of the stuff during the fight impressive, I think that the figures themselves appear almost totally devoid of any real weight or substance. I feel like I’m watching a bunch of polygons. I actually think the Dinos in Jackson’s Kong are inferior to those in Jurrassic Park, for instance.
I also think that having Kong fight three T-Rexes instead of one totally drains the scene of a lot of its visual and dramatic power. I’ve watched the '33 T-Rex fight more times than I could possibly count, and I think that Jackson’s version falls far short. He had the technical superiority to make a frantic, complex battle… but that’s not what Kong’s fight with the T-Rex is about. It’s about powerful, primal imagery. What Jackson did was impressive, but I feel that it all took away from the impact of the scene rather than adding to it.
It was pretty cool how he bit off the T-Rex’s tongue.
shy guy – at the end of the T. Rex fight, when Kong is down to the last one, many of the moves were copied from the '33 version. The film is peppered with allusions and homages to the original, and that’s the longest one. Especiallt at the end, when Kong breaks the T. Rex neck, then works the jaw, monkeylike, before droping it and pounding his chest.
I didn’t get your sense of insubstantial polygons at all. I thought the CGI artists handled mass and weight very well, and I say that as a worshipper of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen.
Oh, indeed. That’s one of the reasons why I noted that my general feelings on Jackson’s version are that almost everything good about it was simply lifted from the earlier film. Kong playing with the dead dino’s jaw is my favorite part of the original fight, so I was happy to see that in there.
Maybe I’ll go watch it again this weekend (is TNT showing it again anytime soon? They usually rerun things to death), but every time I’ve seen it I’ve had this feeling (less so in the theater, but I imagine the booming sound helped with that). I didn’t get it as bad in the fight scene as I did when Kong is running around New York.
I watched Jurrasic Park (and JP3, bleh) again this past weekend as well (I think it was on TNT, too, and my DVR caught it), and I honestly think that JP hadled the weight and heft of its CGI dinos better than Kong.
But I will continue to watch it so that I can give it a fair shot. I love the Kong story, and I really want to like the Jackson version. I just don’t, for the most part. I like some parts of it, of course; I love when Kong is looking for Naomi Watts on the street and just starts picking up blonde women at random and tossing them aside when they’re not her.
I’ll also say that he did the Skull Island natives quite a bit better than the ‘33 film (although I can’t believe we didn’t get a "Kong destroys the natives’ village and eats/steps on some of them" scene).
Oh, that picture was one of the essential moments of my development as a human being.
Time magazine of the 1970s showed toplessness pretty routinely. I remember a pic of Brigitte Bardot emerging from a pond. And one of Miss Nude California or somesuch. I wish I had access to those back issues again.
Love, they had had T-Rexes do a ninja-battle through tree vines. In fact, not one but two were dumb enough to do so. And they would have caught the lead in two seconds (yes, humans always just barely outrun the monsters :rolleyes: ) Except that they had no reason to chase given that they had multi-ton meals sitting around.
Plus, let’s face it, this place didn’t just have a few lost creatures. It was massively, disgustingly packed every fifty feet with another psycho killer carnivore pack. The original was honestly more plausible than the Jackson’s, in which we see endless hordes of predators and virtually no prey - except other predators. And the giant bugs are just ridiculous.
And I got pretty bloody tired of all the screaming in lieu of dialogue or action. And Kong was much, much less sympathetic. In this movie, he squishes people by the dozen, plus tossing random people around and probbaly killing them or shattering their bones. The original Kong was a surprisingly gentle creature. This one was a brutal monster and we’re all better off with him dead.
I watched the new King Kong over the weekend- I really enjoyed it. The scenes on the island really freightened me - which i was not expecting and he actually got me to feel for the love interest between King Kong… I HATED JACK BLACK’s character- which I guess was the point. The 80s version was on tv last night and I had no desire to watch it
Ninja-battle? What ARE you talking about? I’ll agree that Jackson went overboard with three T-rexes giving chase to a mouthful of food, but I suspect they couldn’t resist.
And the presence of so many predators isn’t that absurd when you yourself are down on the level of prey. Read Murray Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet sometime.
Not enough prey? What the hell was that herd of sauropods? Or the ceratopsian (that’s only seen in the extended version)?
My favorite line from the 1976 version.
Dwan to Kong: "What sign are you,…no let me guess an Aries.
Yeah, that’s why I vote for giving Jessica Lange a break – I defy Helen Hayes to deliver a line like that and not sound like a horrible actress.
If the island’s inhabitants built that giant wall to keep Kong from marauding their village, why did they build a Kong-size gate in the wall? Is it for when Kong promised to behave himself and play like a nice ape?
There’s no way the wall was built to keep out Kong specifically. The whole island is covered with ruins, even in the parts that are overrun with giant predators. Clearly, at one time, Skull Island was dominated by a thriving, sophisticated culture, and it was that culture that, at it’s height, built the wall and the gate. What was the gate for? Maybe they had domesticated Kong’s ancestors. Maybe they used the larger herbivores as beasts of burden. Maybe they used to have cockfights using tyrannosaurs. Whatever its original purpose was, it’s been long forgotten by the time the Americans show up.
And how would this wall keep out giant insects?
White mesh swimsuit being worn by…
What’s her name? Cheryl Tiges?
Tiegs. But that was Sports Illustrated, I think.
“You Goddamn chauvinist pig ape!”