![]() In the original version, Kong is captured solely because he won’t take no for an answer: He angrily pursues Ann, only to be overwhelmed by Denham and his crew and brought to New York. Unimpressed by his prowess, she abandons her powerful protector without a second glance when shipmate Jack Driscoll (her love interest) shows up to rescue her. The next hour is an apes-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus scenario: He boldly protects her from a T-Rex, pterodactyls, snakes, and creepy-crawly things she screams in horror. Captured by the tribal natives of a remote island while making a film with the infamous Carl Denham, she has been offered up to Kong as a delectable sacrifice instead, Kong, entranced by her beauty, takes a shine to her. In it, Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray, is terrified by the oversized monkey. King Kong is not the only moody, rage-prone foreign artiste to have a rocky reception Stateside-but few artists fall as hard as he did, or from such lofty heights.The original Kong involved no emotional reciprocity. In Jackson’s King Kong, the big guy is the ultimate temperamental leading man from overseas whose animal magnetism bewitches an ambitious, unscrupulous American filmmaker ( Jack Black), leading to heartbreak for everyone-and more than a few deaths. and motion capture work by Andy Serkis as the lovelorn galoot in Jackson’s loving homage follows on the heels of, and nearly matches, that pair’s revolutionary work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. ![]() The original remains the high-water mark for stop-motion animation even nearly a century later, while the C.G.I. Jackson’s film and the original also double as valentines to cinematic craftsmanship: there as here, Kong himself is both a creative and a technical marvel. The ingénue does some shtick to sooth the savage beast, and he responds not unlike a producer who’s not entirely sure if she’s right for the part. Kong’s early encounters with Watts’s starlet feel oddly like an audition. In part because Jackson is such a cinephile, this King Kong also plays up the filmmaking and show-business aspects of the story more than any other version. Jackson’s King Kong is neither the horndog of 1976 nor the savage brute of 1933: he’s a furry dreamer who pines hopelessly in ways that are all too human for a gorgeous, sad-eyed vaudevillian played by Naomi Watts. ![]() In other words: here’s what all that monkey business is really about. We wouldn’t want you to miss the deeper symbolic significance of movies about a simian monster climbing phallic skyscrapers in pursuit of sexy yet unavailable actresses-so here’s a brief primer on the larger metaphorical elements at play in the major American King Kong movies through the decades. Like vampires, zombies, and superheroes, the story of a giant ape from Somewhere Else-a creature worshiped as a god in his own world, who is kidnapped and taken to the United States in shackles to serve as a plaything for a wealthy white elite-has proven especially metaphorically rich. But there’s another reason King Kong has never left us. It’s easy to see why this character has proven so enduring: as humans, an affection for giant apes seems hard-wired into our DNA, and everyone loves freaky mystery islands full of anachronistic dinosaurs and fantastical beasts. Kong: Skull Island, the latest big-budget, mega-hyped King Kong movie, just hit theaters Friday.
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