Things:

  1. If you had asked me to describe the plot of King Kong in 2004, I would have said “okay, so at the beginning they go to an island and capture a giant gorilla, then they take him around and exhibit him and it’s all sad, and then he breaks free in New York, and goes on a rampage, and finally grabs a woman and climbs a skyscraper, and then biplanes shoot at him.”

    Because it’s that last part that’s the iconic thing about King Kong: Skyscraper, screaming woman, biplanes. Surely it’s the focus of the movie, right? But of course: No. In a 1:44 movie, only the last 20 minutes of it take place in New York.

  2. But I specified 2004 for a reason there, because in 2005, the Xbox 360 was released, and one of its launch titles was King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, as a tie-in to the new Peter Jackson remake of the movie. I wouldn’t normally play tie-in games, but a) it got good reviews, and b) pickings are slim at a console launch, you know?

    And so in King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, you are spending almost the whole game on Skull Island, fighting dinosaurs, both as a dude from the movie (“Play as Man!”) and as King Kong himself (“Play as Kong!”). And so based on that gameplay, I would have expected the movie to be a giant actiony romp on this island full of dinosaurs.

    And… that’s almost exactly what it is. Like, super-almost-exactly. In the movie, when they get off the boat, they have a bunch of guns, and a chest full of powerful gas bombs. You can almost see the little ammo inventory numbers in the upper corners of the screen. And there’s a scene where Kong kills a dinosaur by prying its jaw open and snapping it, and I could almost see the “Press A rapidly” QTE prompt on the screen, and feel my thumb getting sore, because yeah, that was in the game, too. Really, the main difference between the game and the movie, at 13 years remove, is that the game was full of giant cave centipedes, which don’t exist in the movie. (They might be in the Peter Jackson version, idk.)

  3. So also, though, this movie was really surprising for a 1933 movie, because it felt much more modern than that. There were a few things that dated it, like the main characters falling in love and getting engaged about 30 seconds after meeting each other, which is one of those tropes that doesn’t really happen anymore in modern movies; and obviously the special effects were cheesy, with a Kong that reminded me a lot of the Bumble from the Rudolph claymation movie. But fundamentally, it felt like a modern summer action movie.

    Like, when Peter Jackson remade it, he could have done it as a fairly straight remake without having to modernize it much. Something like Ben-Hur from the ’50s felt super-dated and like it’d need to have its guts ripped out to make it into a modern movie, but this is already there.

  4. This is where I would normally say “except for the racism,” because spoiler alert there’s a native tribe with all the jungle drums and face paint that you might expect from a 1930s movie, and it is obviously problematic.

    But a) it’s not really particularly racist by the standards of movies from that era (like, there’s no dancing in blackface, at least), and b) the sad truth is, I honestly don’t think that movies have changed all that much on that front. I think the villagers in the 2005 version were not appreciably better.

  5. Most surprising thing about this movie: How racy it is! Fay Wray gets her clothes peeled off(!) by Kong, leaving her in lacy underclothing, writhing around. It’s like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of 1933.

  6. Overall verdict: I don’t think this is a great movie, but by the standards of summer action movies, it’s very good, and for it to hold up that well after 80+ years is a huge achievement. Unlike a lot of older movies, this one is easily watchable and enjoyable to a broad audience today.