King Kong
Dir. John Guillermin, 1976
| Rated: PG | Writer | Starring |
| Runtime: 2 hrs. 14 min. | Lorenzo Semple, Jr. | Jeff Bridges |
| Producer: Dino De Laurentiis | Jessica Lange | |
| Production Company: Dino De Laurentiis Company | Charles Grodin |
Reviewed by Robert Ring. 8.18.08
How can a remake of a special-effects-based movie have worse special effects than the forty-three-year-predating original? There are two ways: (1) the creators of the original took enormous amounts of time, care, and patience to create visuals that are fantastic yet fully believable and that stand strong through decades, and (2) the creators of the remake did everything as quickly and easily as they could to efficiently crank out a remake for the sake of a remake. Both of these factors contribute to the aesthetic failure of this first remake of King Kong. To say only that the special effects of this film are worse than the original, though, is letting it off the hook easy. Nothing in this movie is as good as the original, and, in fact, nothing in this movie is good at all.
This King Kong has a different set of main characters: Fred Wilson, Jack Prescott, and Dwan. Wilson is a money-hungry businessman on a trip to find what he suspects is an oil jackpot beneath an unexplored island. Prescott is a paleontologist who snuck aboard the ship, having a vague idea of what Wilson is really going to find. Dwan is a rescued woman. While out on another boat trying to land a role as an actress, she was thrown into the ocean by an explosion that killed everyone else she was with, and she was seen floating around in a liferaft by Prescott. When they get to the island, discover the big ape, and find that the island's oil is pretty much worthless, Wilson, greedy as he is, decides to capitalize on Kong. So, he has him captured, thrown into a giant cargo hold, and shipped with them back to the States. When he attempts to show Kong off, however -- you know how it goes -- Kong gets loose and tears the city a new one.
Now for the special effects. Simply put, this portrayal of Kong could not have been much worse. It is a man in a monkey suit walking around green screens and miniature sets. The suit is entirely unconvincing (for one thing, Kong's arms are proportionally about as long as those of a teddy bear), and many of the miniatures, though thankfully not used heavily much as the green screen, look like models from the early fifties. Believe it or not, the special effects crew seems to have used the very same techniques used in 1950s B-movie Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman -- obvious green screens, bad miniatures, and mechanical giant hands for the scenes in which the hand interacts with, or is close to, the human characters.
If that was not enough, get this: There is only ONE other monster (and it's not even the T-rex)! Compare this to the original's six that I can remember off the top of my head. This other monster is a giant snake, and when you see it, it becomes very clear why there are not more. You see, the special effects department really backed themselves into a wall by having a man in costume play Kong. This means that any other monsters that they want him to interact with have to be the size of a human. Just imagine trying to control a fake monster the size of a human with none of the benefits of CGI and none of the versatility of animatronics. The result: unwieldiness and inflexibility. The (non-scaly) snake, when it emerges, seems to float towards Kong. When it reaches him, the fight consists of the snake wrapping itself around him and the two lying down and screaming. It's almost funny. It all comes down to the same basic error: it is impossible to execute a movie like King Kong without using some kind of animation, be it stop-motion (as in the original), CGI (as in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake), or even cartoon animation. Live action was just a quick and easy way for them to run through the job. In fact, there seems to have been far more energy spent concocting ways to show as much of Dwan's skin as possible without any actual nudity than making Kong and his native island living and believable.
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