King Kong vs. King Kong

Two movies on my all-time Top 10 list were made in 1933: "Duck Soup" and "King Kong." We'll probably never have another "Duck Soup" ("Dr. Strangelove" may be as close as we will get, but not even Peter Sellers could play Harpo Marx); however, Peter Jackson has taken a heck of a crack at bringing Kong to a modern audience.

The new version is in part an homage and in part an attempt to improve upon and resolve some of the weaknesses of the original. The original's special effects hold up amazingly well after all of these years, but Jackson has topped them, especially with Kong's lifelike facial expressions. The movie's added length doesn't make the story drag, but it does undercut the elegance of the original's three-act structure, cleanly broken into segments before the island, the nightmare of the island, and the cruelty of the New York sequence.

The movie also pushes the relationship betweeen the ape and the girl to another level, both gaining and losing something in the process. What's lost is some of Kong's purity, which makes him such a potent symbol of everything that seemed to be going wrong in 1933. As Plenty Coups said of grizzly bears, Kong is always "in his right mind," never too tired or too lazy or too timid or too indecisive to do exactly what the occasion requires.

He does battle against a world that neither he nor many of the people living in it could quite understand: a nation of rich resources but mired in depression; a newly coined world power but reluctant to assume the role; a nation founded on free enterprise but increasingly drawn to socialism and communism; an economy built on agriculture in which farmers were abandoning farms by the thousands.

Kong's death is not merely spectacle but public sacrifice. He is brought down by airpower and machine guns, potent symbols for people living just 15 years after World War I had shown how those weapons could overturn everything they thought they knew about the glory of war.

None of that would have worked if the characters or filmmakers had ever shown the slightest indication that they knew what they were up to. They play it for thrills and even throw out a false clue in the "beauty and the beast" motif, relying on Fay Wray's endless fear and repulsion for the beast to show how lost Kong's world really was to contemporary Americans.

For Jackson, playing the story that naively wasn't an option. He lays on the thrills in triplicate but essentially contorts the primitive power of the original into a story about interpersonal relationships. His Kong is noble but too accessible. The ape as mensch just doesn't play.