The Main Elements and Themes in King Kong

'King Kong' (Merian C. Cooper, 1933) is, like all legendary films, several films in one: an overwhelming romantic melodrama, a horror film of an atmosphere never surpassed, a film about cinema and about the irresponsibility of filmmaker, a shuddering parable about the violent incursion of man in nature (which ends violated and destroyed by stupid human ambition), an incisive poem about eroticism and sensuality never consummated. And, in addition to all this, a narrative of great wealth of imagination and capacity for estrangement, which forever changed the conception of the great and the epic. Going back to see it, one enters a territory never explored, neither before nor after, in which the adventure became the luminous expression of the most terrible and most beautiful of the world and of the human being. When I affirm that 'King Kong' is an undying jewel in the adventures cinema of all times, it is because, in my opinion, it poses a sequential continuum that literally does not allow the viewer to breathe. Something is always happening 'physically', and most of the time something 'psychologically' is also happening. Too many movies are sold to us as examples of adventures, and the braiding of adventurous situations and events is very weak or simply does not exist.

But here, once the director Carl Denham finds his dream actress to star in his movie madness, the action does not stop at any time, and no sequence is left, as there is no image or sound, in an impressive emotional structure, which represents in the mind of the spectator, without the slightest exaggeration, an escalation of tension luejo contextualized by the rise of the great gorilla to the top of the Empire State Building (newly built at that time). Literally, we float and feel a vertigo similar to that of the abducted actress because from the beginning of the story we perceive psychologically the sensations of this character, and we do not abandon that perception until the end, merit of the staging and the rhythm of the directors.

But it is also forced to pay homage to some amazing special effects, both in regard to the design and modeling of the very varied creatures that appear, and its expressiveness, because really with very little effort on our part we can believe the Dantesque spectacle that It happens before our eyes. Now many will see these effects and find them naive or, hopefully, endearing. But the level of stop-motion achieved is amazing, and the interaction with real images (a complicated photomontage process) worthy of all praise. So much so that eighty years after its completion, the story keeps crawling, merit also of a brilliant production design, which takes us to the Skull Island and the New York of the art deco as never after, nobody has done, shaken by the history of the giant ape that they capture and lead to their downfall.

And it is that the final death of Kong prey on the mood of the viewer as few things I have seen in my life, we returned the hallucinated eyes of childhood, because that is the great adventure: return to that childhood state in which we discovered the death of innocence, the barbarism of civilization, the birth of sensuality and eroticism in its most primal state. And it is not for less that of eroticism, thanks to the presence of a beautiful Fay Wray. The Canadian actress embodies a woman of high sensuality even today, and much more, as is logical in the early thirties. She is the living image of innocence, sweetness and sex in a primal state (never better said), and we are also the Kong in love, obsessed with that image of possession of the definitive blonde snatched at the last moment.

To consider other films very inferior to this as 'masterpieces' is almost a crime against humanity. The epic grandeur, the richness of imagination, the capacity for estrangement, the disturbing atmosphere that can almost be touched with the fingers, the dramatic construction, the moral and sexual ambiguity of the story, the beauty of the characters, all make 'King Kong 'in an exceptional jewel, one of the most impressive of all time. When Rosen talks about the movie, he discusses the different aspects and times involved in this movie. He starts by saying that Racism is seen in this movie. Kong is taken out where he was and then all the natives get lost because they worshiped him as a god figure The figure of the big black monkey that is taken from his house (the jungle) to the city, slaved and then the people set him on stage so everyone can see and this people end up killing him. Rosen also says that his downfall was that he fell in love with Ann and she represents the white woman. Natives were desperate to give this Big Monster the pretty, blonde American because they had never seen something like that and neither had the gorilla.

Unlike its ancestors, King Kong behaves like an animal. This is not a degradation of the myth but ways of appealing to a new sensibility. After the environmental movement emerged in the 1970s, gorillas were considered more akin to humans than the then popular chimpanzees. The emotional empathy, the ability to learn and the consequent possibility of communication changed the figure of the monster gorilla shaped, in good part, by the image spread in King Kong. After shaking it on the way to the deep jungle, he looks at it as if deciphering whether it is a mosquito or a yellow lizard. The actress is in need of asserting herself for something, and resorts to the theater routines juggling, tap, car laps? With which she made a living before embarking on the mission. It entertains him, then. And he obtains, like Scheherazade, the pardon of a bored king and without criminal vigor.

To finish, it also deserves to call attention to the high doses of violence and eroticism that occur in many of his stills, quite advanced for his time, a circumstance that ended up propitiating that years later, the film was losing footage in its successive reruns, until in the 70s it was finally re-released just as its architects originally conceived it. Although the damage was already done, and the tape would lose in this tour, and so far, one of the most terrifying scenes of the film, one that passed in a ravine with giant spiders as protagonists and that would be replicated by of the recent remake of Peter Jackson, although said sequence would only be included in its extended montage, edited directly in domestic format.

This movie has fun and moves, minimum rate for a story that was told before but that has as themes the surprise and the fascination. 'It was not the planes that killed the beast, it was the beauty,' says the epilogue to the King Kong versions memorable to this day. Jackson repeats the line, but his truth, between the lines, is another. If something saved your beauty? If there was a message, this was the ability to interest your viewer.

When we first got this assignment I thought we had to watch King Kong but the one that is not Netflix, which is the most recent one. I started watching it and then I realized that we had to watch King Kong 1933 so, I watched both of them. Even though there are no differences in the plot of the movie there are quite some differences on some of the scenes. One of the main differences is the natives. In the 1933 movie, when the crew arrives to the skull island the immediately see the natives because they were preparing one girl to be given to King Kong as his “girlfriend” but, in the 2012 movie, they arrive to the island and as they start walking and they do not see anybody there, as they continue walking a little girl comes out of a cave and she tells them to go, Denham offers her a bar of chocolate and when he tries to get closer she attacks him and then all of a sudden there are hundreds of natives coming out of their caves to attack the Americans.

Another thing that there is to mention when talking about differences are the dinosaurs. We know that the natives take Ann and then all the crew starts looking for her. When they are looking for her, they find the dinosaurs. On the 1933 movie, there is only one dinosaur and one of the men from the crew offers to distract him and then the dinosaur eats him but everyone else gets to run away from it. Now, on Jackson’s movie, there are a whole bunch of dinosaurs and then Denham starts recording them and when they realized that there are humans over there, they start pursuing the crew and it takes about 10 minutes of the movie just them trying to run away from the dinosaurs.

I did not like the fact that the most recent movie takes a long time to get to the point of the movie. The crew is always finding more and more trouble trying to take Miss Ann from King Kong. It takes about 3 hours because they are always trying to run away from some mysterious creatures. I like that on the Merian movie, he gets straight to the point and he only takes half of the time Jackson took. On the 1933 movie, Ann was terrified by Kong all the time, she never felt good while being around him and that is how Miss Ann felt at the beginning of 2012 movie. She was scared of the monster at the beginning of the movie but then, King Kong saves her from many creatures that wanted to eat her and then she felt protected by him. By the end of the movie she even tries to stop the army of shooting King Kong but of course, it did not happen.

The movie ends when the monkey falls down of the Empire State Building and there are many reporters trying to take pictures of King Kong and they are all trying to figure out how that big monkey got to New York City. They all come with many theories and they even congratulate the army for killing him but then Denham comes to the scene and he finishes by saying my favorite line from the movie. “It wasn’t the airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast”.