Lileks Takes On Kong
Lileks is once again reading my mind, as I was planning a big post fisking King Kong after watching it this weekend. Here's a choice bit of Lileks discussing a scene that particularly insulted my intelligence, also:
Problem is, I didn’t believe anything. I’m willing to suspend disbelief both piecemeal and wholesale; if a movie requires me to believe that Bruce Willis can fight terrorists on a skyscraper for a night, well, fine. If the Lord of the Rings asks that I believe in ghost riders and evil rings and magic and elves, fine. But don’t ask me to believe that Bruce Willis can take six bullets to the brain, or that Hobbits can grow wings and pee fire, unless you’ve previously set them up as a wing-growing, fire-peeing species. Be careful, in other words. If you want me to believe that someone with no weapons training can use a machine gun to shoot the bugs off someone who’s moving around, okay: you’ve spent all your chits. Unless you don’t expect me to believe anything, in which case: why did you make this movie? Because I don’t care.
Absolutely spot on. As I mentioned way back in my review of From Russia With Love, a director has to build up his "suspension of disbelief" bank account carefully and diligently. There is a reason Terence Young spends all this time following Rosa Klebb through S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s training facilities -- it is to make the point that S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has training facilities, and that they understand that killing James Bond is not going to be easy. A good director -- in this case, Terence Young -- spends his time and effort on the scripts and on the backstory, so that when you get to the more ludicrous parts of the film, the viewer says "Yeah, it might have happened." But in Kong, Peter Jackson is so in love with the power of his CGI effects that he wallows in them from the beginning all the way to the end. During the fight with the big bugs (which is completely unnecessary, does nothing to advance the plot, and features the impossible use of the Thompson which bother Lileks), I turned to my wife and said "This is what happens when you shoot a movie from a treatment, and don't have a script." When you have the words "Action Sequence" penciled in the margins, and decide to waste seven or eight minutes on monsters and characters we don't need or care about, you're being self-indulgent. And there's no quicker way to piss off an audience than to be self-indulgent.
If no one else is willing to say it, I'll say it -- King Kong is a terrible movie, and Peter Jackson ought to have been flayed alive in the press for making it. I haven't seen anything but the most muted and respectful dissents from the movie media, though, which tells you how big The Lord of the Rings made him. He's too big to dare to offend.
Well, Kong doesn't just offend us with a little bit of stretching. It goes out of its way to use the computer to mock the physics of the real world. Its effects, though visually stunning, are meaningless, because we don't believe them. The entire film, despite its loving CGI recreations of New York and Skull Island, is nothing more than a glorified Road Runner cartoon, except that the Road Runner cartoons were funny.
Peter Jackson could have cut twenty minutes from the Skull Island sequences and invested it in his characters, and this would have been a good film. It says something about him as a director that he didn't feel he needed to do that -- and what it says isn't flattering. It says "George Lucas."
