Jackson's King Kong: a colossal disappointment

Because I'm both too annoyed by the film to bother and because Aviva has already written a very intelligent send-up of Jackson's latest film, I'm not going to bother composing my own lengthy invective against the remake. Let's just say that two hours into the film--just as Jack Black and his peons were being tramped upon by Brontosauruses--I exclaimed to Aviva: "My God! They haven't even returned to New York yet. Shoot me now." When we returned home, we spent about an hour raving about Jack Black's horrendous acting, the overdone and tiresome special effects, particularly the tedious dinosaur chase scenes, and, above all, the offensive representation of the "primitives" of Skull Island. So, why have only a handful of critics called Jackson on this? Nothing like the kerfufle caused by a certain Star Wars character a few years ago. I realize that the original film makes a fantasy out of the colonizing instinct; essentially, it glorifies the white man's desire to bring back the black "beast" in chains and make him do his bidding; it encourages a hysterical response to the beast's desire for a beautiful, blonde, white woman; it insists that the beast brought about his own downfall, that "it was beauty killed the beast." And yet, I would agree with The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter who observed that Jackson's remake only exacerbates the racist limitations in the original: "[The story of King Kong] remains a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West, all issues that were obvious in the original but unexamined; they remain unexamined here, if more vivid." For me, the original also exposes the problems of this colonial quest, even if the filmmakers of 1933 failed to recognize the double-edged message of their seemingly innocent fantasy narrative. I would argue that Jackson's depiction of the "natives" robs the narrative of any subversive potential. Why show the inhabitants of Skull Island as raving lunatics incapable of communicating even among themselves, showing only the "whites of their eyes" as they convulse and twist in epileptic fever-attacks. He takes the Melanesians, who he cast to play the natives, and makes them up to look and act like zombies, more monstrous and less capable of human feeling than the great ape. The only redeeming qualities of the film? Naomi Watts and the titular ape. Anyway, check out Aviva's review because, even though we often have very different reactions to films, we are on the exact same page where the new King Kong is concerned.