Almost everything in this film is bad in terms of conception, but not so much in terms of execution. The whole thing reads today as trash film with a higher than usual budget. Production values are great, for the time and type of film.
Not much is made with the potential of the Kong story, at least nothing that wasn't already deeply explored in the previous 1933 film, and the Peter Jackson version. This means all the self- referential bits are either lost or are clumsy handled. So the Bridges character is still a photographer, but his character is used as a know-it-all who explains everyone around him what's going on, there's no film within in the island, and the show in New York is just a mechanical device that triggers the last expected sequence. Here that sequence is played in the twin towers instead of the empire state which the character from Lange references earlier. Impossible to watch any post- or pre- 9/11 which uses the WTC as a set without correlating...
But one thing is magnificent here, and only incidentally helped by the creative/production decisions. Because this is made into an exploitation vehicle, the sexual friction (quite literally) is brought to the center of the thing. See how Jessica Lange enters the film, as a desirable sex being, stranded on a rubber boat. The ship crew, Bridges and, of course, us, the audience, lust after her. Lange channels the unaware-on purpose explicit sexuality which was Marylin Monroe's persona, and she does it so well. And that's what works in this film. Jessica Lange would do so much better later, in terms of ambition and acting. But here she is all sex, all desire, all lust, and she brings out that obvious side of the Kong story better than any of the versions or spin-offs that have already been made. That's because she teases you into the thing, seduces the audiences as she seduces Prescott, as she seduces Kong. What else is acting? Because of her such cheap trash tricks as the Kong finger unclothing her become a powerful erotic depiction, and only because of that this film may be worth seeing.
Not much is made with the potential of the Kong story, at least nothing that wasn't already deeply explored in the previous 1933 film, and the Peter Jackson version. This means all the self- referential bits are either lost or are clumsy handled. So the Bridges character is still a photographer, but his character is used as a know-it-all who explains everyone around him what's going on, there's no film within in the island, and the show in New York is just a mechanical device that triggers the last expected sequence. Here that sequence is played in the twin towers instead of the empire state which the character from Lange references earlier. Impossible to watch any post- or pre- 9/11 which uses the WTC as a set without correlating...
But one thing is magnificent here, and only incidentally helped by the creative/production decisions. Because this is made into an exploitation vehicle, the sexual friction (quite literally) is brought to the center of the thing. See how Jessica Lange enters the film, as a desirable sex being, stranded on a rubber boat. The ship crew, Bridges and, of course, us, the audience, lust after her. Lange channels the unaware-on purpose explicit sexuality which was Marylin Monroe's persona, and she does it so well. And that's what works in this film. Jessica Lange would do so much better later, in terms of ambition and acting. But here she is all sex, all desire, all lust, and she brings out that obvious side of the Kong story better than any of the versions or spin-offs that have already been made. That's because she teases you into the thing, seduces the audiences as she seduces Prescott, as she seduces Kong. What else is acting? Because of her such cheap trash tricks as the Kong finger unclothing her become a powerful erotic depiction, and only because of that this film may be worth seeing.