30 day film challenge: Day 5

A film that you think is underrated...

I'm throwing a curveball and going with King Kong. Thank you Peter Jackson.

I went to go see this film for my 15th birthday. It was an 8pm showing and we were only 14 and couldn't go unless Dad came too (so thankfully he did) and even though it was long, it was SO GOOD.

But every time I read about it or heard about it from other people, they hated it.

As soon as someone hears 'remake' everyone automatically groans. But bearing in mind the preceding Kong movie was released in 1933 and then 1976, I think it's safe to say enough time had passed. Kong has since had another sequel (Kong: Skull Island, starring Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston), but I still think this one's better.

Just off the back of the success of Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was definitely more well known when this came out in 2005, and given what he had achieved with LOTR, I think everyone expected the same amount of effects and vision to have gone into this... and I believe there has.

Having never seen the originals, I can't have an opinion on how emotional or on how bad the effects were... but I can tell you that excellent 'special effects' are what made the originals so groundbreaking. And that's the same here too.

Kong is, as expected, the star of the show. And he is everything you expect him to be and more. All the characters are. Kong is SO believable. He isn't just a man in a suit. He IS a massive Gorilla, because Jackson has used the success of motion capture (Mo-Cap) same as with Gollum. But it isn't just about the effects itself, it's about the emotion you see in him as well. That's where Mo-Capping reigns supreme. It's the fact you can see the little motions, or the sparkle in his eyes, and the fact you can see that he's not just an all-powerful, all-scary, 100 foot Gorilla... he's also lonely. And the reason you can see it is because of the technology and special effects Jackson uses with Motion Capture, same as how he'd captured the emotions with Gollum.

But there's more. You soon learn that Kong and Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) are essentially Yin and Yang. She's emotionally strong but physically weak; he is powerful but truly isolated both physically (being alone on an island) and on a species level, being the last of his kind. Together the characters build a believable, platonic romance - a close friendship - and the fact Peter Jackson pulls it off without making it seem weird or anything close to bestiality shows just how amazing of a director Peter Jackson really is.

Now it does have its faults too. First, a racist portrayal of the Native peoples, which is unnecessary and doesn't really serve the story, and is said to be in the previous iterations too. But the second is not having more female characters. There is literally only one. And although Ann is the forefront, she doesn't have many lines and is set to play the 'damsel in distress' character, a weak female role, in Jack Black's directorial film (although it could be said this was telling of films at the time).

But yeah. King Kong is great. Yes, it may be over 3 hours and Kong first makes an appearance at nearly an hour in... but it's bloody worth the wait. And I am so glad I saw it in the cinema too. It's one of those films that was made for the big screen. So I'd also like to thank my dad for sacrificing 3 hours of his time to allow me to watch this.

Might be a weekend watch too... We'll see. (I have so many new movies to watch oh my goodness).