I went to see King Kong last night, and I was pleasantly surprised. First of all, the CG was just amazing. When they did close up shots of Kong, I couldn’t tell whether they used a real ape or not. I was thinking they might have just gotten a smaller one and then changed the size of everything else. It would have been hard for them to train and ape to do make those facial expressions.
The movie was pretty entertaining too. The whole thing had this great sense of adventure to it. I couldn’t figure out how they were going to fill 3 hours, but most of it was full of exciting scenes in the jungle. I won’t spoil those for you.
The movie drew a lot of conspicuous comparisons to Heart of Darkness. I really didn’t get the reference until about 5 minutes ago. In the book, a guy travels down this jungle river and found “civilized” men living amongst savages. (At least, I think that’s how to goes. It’s been a few years since I read that book). The parallel comes in the form of Kong traveling to live in New York. The movie then is asking, who is the real savage? I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t figure that out until today. I’ll blame it on the fact that I didn’t really remember the Heart of Darkness story very well.
