Following his highly successful adaptation of Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson tackled another classic, Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933). Of course, he had a far bigger budget, and it shows in this latest version. Jackson’s Kong is an epic, though the story remains about the same: An ambitious, ruthless moviemaker persuades his cast to travel to the mysterious Skull Island, where they discover a giant gorilla. Indeed, this is the most expensive film made since Titanic – USD 207 million (equal to the total Chinese box-office revenue for 2005) – and much of the cash was spent to grand affect. Emotions, action and special effects are state of the art, which is to say they are overblown. True, Jackson has worked hard on character development, and roughly the first third of this three-hour long movie serves to introduce the players. The 7.6m ape appears some 70 minutes into the film, and he does look real, courtesy of the motion-capture technique (the same used for Gollum in the Rings trilogy). That said, this high-tech, megabuck version has nothing on the original.
Universal Pictures/UIP

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
March 2006 issue



(c)that's Guangzhou
Guanzhou Chief editor: Christopher Cottrell
March 2006 issue