oldnewbie

I read Michael Zupan's DVD review of King Kong at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=36001 and...I agree but was also not pleasedthat the character of Carl Denham was turned into such a jerk. As a huge fan of the original, I liked that Denham, while certainly reckless, genuinely cared about Ann and Jack, if not Kong. In this version, Denham cares about no one but himself.

mzupeman2

I grew up on the original, and you know what? You're absolutely right. That's one aspect about the original compared to the new that I didn't really think about!

Maybe Jackson thought that Denham wouldn't have been likely to be a source of love for the girl who he got to come along on the shady expedition? I guess it makes sense when you think of that way. I wouldn't care who the heck came to rescue me, if it was the man that got me into that mess in the first place, forget it! lol

More than likely though, Jackson was using a new character to sort of bounce off of Denham, that way there would be another dynamic between characters, and that's what Jackson really wanted to do... make us feel the relationships between characters. Unfortunately, he failed at that, except for the relationship between Ann and Kong which was brilliant. If Jackson made Carl Denham a character that was not just 'Jack Black' one dimensional, then we could have cut out the writer, and the script could have been quite a bit shorter.

Good catch there oldnewbie! Thanks for the input, and giving me something to think about!

islandclaws

I agree with both of you. Robert Armstrong was 100x the man that Jack Black's Denham was. Jackson sorely miscast that role in the film. I didn't feel like Denham had the right nor the intelligence to deliver the film's final line. Perhaps if he had spent less time developing the shipmates and more time on the film's crucial relationships then more could have been said of the leading trio. As it stands Jack Driscoll and Dwan (from 1976) had infinitely more chemistry than anyone in Jackson's version.