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Technofiction Review of

King Kong (2005)

by Roger Bourke White Jr., Dec 05

Introduction

The 1933 King Kong movie and the 1931 Dracula movie began the action and horror movie eras in talking movies (Nosferatu was an earlier silent movie version of Dracula). Both have spawned hundreds of similarly themed movies in the decades since. What makes the 2005 King Kong different is only that it tries to retell the original story with updated effects.

 

It’s been a long time since I saw the 1933 version.  The shortcomings that I remember from that movie were:

 

First, that Kong kept changing in size – at some points in the movie he is three times man-size, at others he is three stories tall, and when he gets on the Empire State Building, he’s about nine stories tall.  He’s always a terrific mover and shaker, but the size thing kept bugging me.

 

Second, people’s motivations in that movie were always wacky, although I don’t remember details.

 

On to the 2005 version…

Peter Jackson in the 2005 version has gone all out to show a real, moving-about gorilla that is 25 feet tall.  In this movie height does matter, so Kong is pretty consistently the same height throughout.  His movements and fur are good. 

I saw these problems with Kong:

 

Yeah, Skull Island is fantasy, but the scenes with the T-Rex’s and Kong hanging in the vines are so over the top....

 

Those are Kong Problems.  There are also problems with Skull Island.

 

Skull Island Problems

Skull Island is a typical “island of mystery” of the pre-satellite days. (Once we had observing satellites in the late 1960’s, there could be no more undiscovered mystery islands.)  Such islands are always fog shrouded, always jungle covered, always found using some kind of pirate map, and always have a mystery city. (These rules about lost islands are so “hardwired” that when I tried to run a fantasy role playing scenario involving one, all my players guessed all of the above as soon as they found out the adventure was about a lost island!  As a Dungeon Master, my jaw dropped.  I thought I’d created a pretty neat island of mystery, but in reality I’d created an island of no surprises. Ah well....)

 

The problem is: there are no surprises on the island of mystery, and Skull Island is no exception.

 

Conclusion

All-in-all, it’s a fun movie to watch.  Its long, but the minor players do a lot in the movie, which helps make it interesting.  The authenticity of Kong as looking like and moving like a real gorilla is hyped by the media, and it’s a nice thing, but it’s not essential to the movie.  He is, after all, not a gorilla, but a twenty five foot imitation of one.  In reality, he should move like an elephant, not a gorilla.

Likewise, the motivations of the human characters is improved from the 1933 version, but there are still some holes.  In sum, we have a highly watchable movie here, and better than average technofiction.

-- The End --

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