King Kong review.
King Kong arrived ninety years ago. Landmark special effects brought the monster to life in a way that remains memorable to this day. The story has been retold…but the ground broken by the original has never been matched.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
King Kong
Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose
Starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Brue Cabot
King Kong Review
King Kong wasn’t the first giant monster movie. It also isn’t the first feature length film to feature stop-motion special effects. Both of those honors (probably) belong to 1926’s The Lost World. The man behind the monsters and their innovative animation style was Willis H. O’Brien. Seven years after The Lost World gave us the first look at stop-motion dinosaurs he would bring the world his most memorable and lasting work. Kong, the eighth wonder of the world.
You know the story of King Kong. Even if you’ve somehow avoided every version of it. It’s an incredibly simple tale. A bare bones story that is in place simply to get to the incredible effects for the time. Characters are even simpler in this original version. There are no arcs to follow or development to track. What there is…is a giant ape. He fights other monsters and abducts a woman. He climbs the Empire State Building and falls to his death battling airplanes. For 1933…that’s more than it needed to be.
This leaves us with two distinct paths in discussing King Kong. Content and legacy. The legacy of King Kong is unquestionable. Mostly tied to its state-of-the-art special effects and popularizing the giant monster movie…it’s one of the most influential and important movies ever made. Content wise? Well…that’s a different story.
The plot of King Kong is very much a means to an end. We need to get to Skull Island…and we need the giant monster to run loose in New York City. The human characters don’t do much that isn’t directly tied to pushing the story towards these ends. The bulk of the movie is comprised of watching the animated Kong in action. Those aspects work so well, even 90 years on, that the movie is often genuinely thrilling. The story beats around them? Not so much.
This brings us to the Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) of it all. She serves as the story’s protagonist. She’s an iconic character…the beauty that killed the beast. She also has so little to do in the 1933 version of this movie that it’s honestly incredible. Ann spends the first act being told to shut up. By the climax she’s engaged to Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). She spends the interim screaming. And boy…can she scream.
Darrow’s grand purpose in King Kong is to get captured, scream, and need rescue. She’s treated as a literal prop to show off O’Brien’s revolutionary mixture of stop-motion and live action. She’s picked up and carried by the giant monster in a way that still looks impressive today. She hangs out in frame while Kong battles dinosaurs…and sits atop the Empire State Building while he fights off the planes. It’s all a technical marvel. And a character with nothing to say.
We aren’t going to let talk of content go by without addressing the elephant in the room. Talking about movies from bygone eras can present a host of problems. On it’s surface King Kong is the story of white men going to a foreign land and bringing someone back in chains for their own profit. Nothing about King Kong indicates there is some deeper meaning to anything else going on…so ignoring the surface as the point feels like a lazy out. The only black characters in the movie are the primitive savages of Skull Island. Every character on the ship or in New York is white. White people intrude on a culture…and then have their culture threatened by what they brought back with them.
The directors denied any of this was intentional or intended. But that doesn’t matter. As we discussed in our review of Night of the Living Dead…Romero may not have intended to present a social commentary by casting a black lead…but doing so makes it unavoidable. By signaling here that society is white, and the black characters represent other…Kong makes its commentary unmistakable as well. 90 years later all we can really do is acknowledge it. There are in-depth thoughts on the matter researched by much smarter people if you want to seek them out.
So, the content of Kong’s 1933 story is slight at best and problematic at worst. But it’s also a stone cold classic. King Kong’s legacy of pushing special effects forward and popularizing a genre are hall of fame worthy. The stop-motion Kong creates a unique, and ultimately timeless, look. Fight scenes are incredible to watch nine decades later. The mixture of live action and animation is groundbreaking. They still impress today.
It also boasts a perfect climax. As fun as it is to watch Kong carry Ann around and fight dinosaurs…nothing can touch the final act in the city that never sleeps. Watching Kong escape his captors and climb the most famous building in the city is an incredible piece of business. Swatting planes away until he falls to his death…as iconic as film gets.
The problems with King Kong lie in its story and characters. The strengths are in its incredible effects. It stands as a spectacle that loses none of its wonder as we race towards its centennial. It has an important and enduring legacy. Its story leaving much to be desired.
Scare Value
So, what do we do with a movie like King Kong? Is it a classic because it is a masterwork…or is it a classic because it was first? The truth is it’s a bit more of the latter. A technical marvel with thrilling monster action. The story is…slight at best. There are no dramatic character arcs here like we would find in Godzilla two decades later. It also, to be kind, lacks that film’s thoughtfulness and commentary. Do we judge this landmark and highly influential film by its content or its legacy? A three-star movie with five-star impact.
We’ll split the difference.
4/5
King Kong Links
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King Kong Trailer
If you enjoyed this review of King Kong, check out our review of Godzilla
