Peter Jackson’s King Kong runs 188 minutes and spends much of its first hour at sea. The 2005 film is the ninth entry in the King Kong franchise and the second remake of the 1933 film of the same title, the first being the 1976 remake. It puts Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody at the center of a Depression-era New York story about a filmmaker who lies to his cast to reach a place he should not go.
It works more often than it stalls.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Carl Denham Lies to a Cargo Ship
The setup is 1933, and vaudeville performer Ann Darrow is out of work. Financially troubled filmmaker Carl Denham hires her for a picture opposite actor Bruce Baxter. She hesitates until she learns her favorite playwright, Jack Driscoll, wrote the script. That is the hook, and it is enough.
Denham’s real plan is Skull Island. He tells Captain Englehorn the SS Venture will sail to Singapore. It will not. The crew suspects trouble, and Englehorn reconsiders the voyage before the ship leaves Surabaya. A radio message then tells Englehorn there is a warrant for Carl’s arrest — the studio ordered production to stop and Carl defied it — and instructs him to divert to Rangoon. Fog swallows the ship. It runs aground on Skull Island.
Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens take their time getting there. That is the film’s clearest strength and its most obvious cost. The first act is talk, and the talk is good.
Kong Is 25 Feet Tall and the Natives Want Ann
The island does not waste time once the crew lands. Natives attack the explorers, killing boom operator Mike and a crewman. Englehorn pulls Carl’s group out. As they prepare to leave, the natives abduct Ann to sacrifice her to Kong, a 25-foot-tall ape.
Jack notices Ann’s disappearance. The crew goes back. Kong takes Ann into the jungle, and Carl catches a glimpse of him and decides he will film the thing. Englehorn assembles a rescue party led by first mate Hayes and Jack, with Carl, cameraman Herb, Baxter and assistant Preston along.
Then the movie turns into a monster picture. The party is caught between a herd of grazing Brontosaurus baxteri and a pack of Utahraptor-like Venatosaurus saevidicus hunting them. Herb and several others die. The sequence is the reason the runtime exists.
Andy Serkis Plays Kong, and Watts Plays Against Him
Watts met the original Ann Darrow, Fay Wray, before shooting. Jackson wanted Wray for a cameo and the final line of dialogue. She died during pre-production at 96.
Andy Serkis is the motion-capture performer for Kong, and he also plays Lumpy. Watts plays Ann opposite a creature that is not there on set, and the film’s emotional center holds because she treats Kong as a scene partner rather than an effect. That is the performance the movie needs and the one it gets.
Black was cast as Denham on the strength of his work in the 2000 film High Fidelity, which impressed Jackson. He studied P. T. Barnum and Orson Welles for the part. “I didn’t study [Welles] move for move. It was just to capture the spirit. Very reckless guy. I had tapes of him drunk off his ass,” Black said.
That is the right instinct for Denham, who is not a villain so much as a man who cannot stop selling.
The Budget Was $207 Million
Filming ran in New Zealand from September 2004 to March 2005. The budget climbed from an initial $150 million to $207 million, which made King Kong the most expensive film ever produced at the time of its release. Development had started back in early 1995, when Universal Pictures approached Jackson about a remake. The project stalled in early 1997 because several ape and giant monster films were in production and Jackson planned to direct The Lord of the Rings series instead. As the first two films in the Rings trilogy became commercially successful, Universal went back to Jackson in early 2003. Jackson eventually agreed.
You can see the money. Skull Island has weight and weather. The dinosaurs move like animals with mass. Very little of it looks like a set.
You can also see the length. At 188 minutes, King Kong carries a second act that a tighter cut would trim, and the voyage to the island is longer than the story needs. Jackson earns the ending, but he takes the long road to it.
The cameos are a small pleasure. Jackson appears with makeup artist Rick Baker — who portrayed Kong and designed the makeup for the 1976 version — as the pilot and gunner on the plane that kills Kong. Howard Shore, who was initially set to compose before he exited, cameos as the conductor of the New York theater Kong escapes from. Frank Darabont and Rings co-producer Rick Porras appear as gunners in the other planes.
The native extras on Skull Island were played by a mix of Asian, African, Maori and Polynesian actors sprayed with dark makeup to achieve a consistent pigmentation. That choice has not aged well, and it is worth naming plainly rather than letting the spectacle cover it.
What holds up is the middle. The Kong and Ann material is the film’s strongest stretch, and it is the part that justifies the remake existing at all.
What does not hold up is the pacing. The film is 188 minutes and does not need to be. The Skull Island rescue party sequence runs long, and the Brontosaurus stampede is more impressive than it is tense.
Set against the franchise, this is the version with the most craft and the least restraint. It is not the tightest King Kong. It is the one with the biggest heart, and the heart is Watts and a computer-generated ape.
The published critical score sits at 8.1/10, with a Metacritic score of 81/100. That is about right. King Kong is an overlong, occasionally clumsy, frequently beautiful adventure that earns its ending and asks for more patience than it should.
Key Facts
- Title: King Kong (2005)
- Director: Peter Jackson
- Writers: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
- Runtime: 188 minutes
- Budget: $207 million (up from an initial $150 million)
- Filming: New Zealand, September 2004 to March 2005
- Cast: Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, Jack Black, Andy Serkis, Colin Hanks, Thomas Kretschmann, Jamie Bell
- Score: 8.1/10 (Metacritic 81/100)
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