Josh Bearman has some, er, original meditations on the new King Kong movie:
Cooper and Schoedsack weren't entirely off their rockers when they cast Kong and Fay Wray in a “great romance.” Humans share enough DNA and chromosomal similarity with both gorillas and chimpanzees — we're 99 percent genotypically congruent with chimps — that offspring might be possible, were biologists unscrupulous enough to try it. There's always suspicion they may have already; for some reason, Japan often gets fingered as the place that has secretly developed primate crossbreeds. And then there was the case of Oliver, a circus chimpanzee who seemed so human — he lived with a family in South Africa, where he liked to feed the dogs and sip whiskey while watching TV — that he was tested for human parentage. He came up negative, but in the end Oliver had to be sold because he developed an overpowering sexual interest in his female owner and woman visitors.
On the Island of Dr. Moreau, such monkey love is a perversion, a human foible and horror. On Skull Island, it is, of course, the source of redemption. And the great achievement of Peter Jackson's technical modernization of the original adventure story is that he finally presents a Kong who shows genuine emotion. Whereas the 1976 version was perhaps the most overtly sympathetic to the beast — Jack Driscoll having been replaced by Jeff Bridges' hippie primatologist who champions Kong's right to live unmolested — Jackson's Kong is so expressive that he elicits the most sympathy of any beast in cinema history.
Anyone seen it yet? What's the verdict?
