After the excesses of his first trilogy, Peter Jackson turns to another gigantic figure. Set in 1933, at the heart of the Depression, the film begins by anchoring the myth in scarcity. Its duration takes the time to establish New York’s poverty, economic urgency, the need for spectacle as escapism. From then on, the expedition to Skull Island is not just an exotic adventure: it extends a logic of predation already at work in the city. Carl Denham embodies this ambiguity. As much a visionary as a stubborn manipulator, he captures to show, he tears from the world to produce an image. Jackson films him without outright condemning him, and it is in this restraint that the trouble emerges. By resurrecting Kong through digital means, the filmmaker seems to reflect on his own practice indirectly: to create an image, is it already to enchain what is filmed?
Skull Island emerges as an archaic world, shrouded in mists and bristling with hostile verticalities. Some may argue about certain lengths or technological intoxication, but this inflation is part of the film’s very gesture. The work itself becomes an immense creature, both admirable and excessive, torn between nostalgia for cinema’s origins and contemporary digital power. Thanks to Andy Serkis’s motion capture performance, Kong ceases to be a mere spectacular attraction: his gaze becomes the emotional center of the story. The beast acquires interiority, vulnerability, a capacity for hesitation and tenderness.
Facing him, Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, is no longer just an icon to be saved. Their relationship is based on a fragile, almost childlike recognition that momentarily suspends the power dynamic. It is this suspension that makes the tragedy even more cruel. When Kong is exhibited in New York, chained like an attraction, the film clearly asserts that modernity turns otherness into commodity.
The climb up the Empire State Building then encapsulates the meaning of the narrative. The higher Kong rises, the more exposed he becomes. The verticality becomes that of a sacrifice. The fall is not an accident, but the logical conclusion of a system that captures, exhibits, and destroys what it does not know how to look at other than as a spectacle.
