Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch King Kong
2005 · Peter Jackson · King Kong on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the sooty grays of Depression New York before the voyage. (light)
Andrew Lesnie shoots 1933 in desaturated, sooty tones with burnished amber inside the theaters and tenements. Skull Island then arrives in dank, fog-shrouded greens and grays. Two palettes, one for each world.
Payoff: The look tells you which kind of picture you are in long before any creature turns up.
Watch how much of the frame Lesnie gives the horizon. (camera)
The anamorphic 2.39 frame runs wide across the island's ravines and shorelines. Later the same frame turns the city vertical. Jackson uses the shape of the image to change what scale means.
Payoff: Width makes the island feel endless and height makes the city feel like a trap.
Watch how many creatures are stacked into a single shot. (staging)
Skull Island is staged as a rotting ecosystem: cyclopean ruins, dinosaurs, insects, vermin, everything feeding on everything. The crew are almost never alone in a frame. Something else is always in it with them.
Payoff: The place exists to be survived, and that pressure forces every decision the humans make on it. In the reading: the encompasser. The reading calls the island an encompasser: a surrounding world that presses on people and calls action out of them.
Listen for Kong's quieter grunts in between the roars. (sound)
The sound team built his voice from manipulated animal recordings, and the vocabulary runs from enormous roars down to small, almost conversational noises. The scale of his voice tracks the scale of the scene.
Payoff: Sound is doing most of the work that turns a digital animal into somebody with moods.
Watch Kong's face when he has nothing to fight. (performance)
Andy Serkis's capture and Weta's animation get praised for fur and muscle. The harder achievement is a synthetic face that can hold one expression with no line to speak and nothing to do.
Payoff: A feeling registers and never turns into an act, which is why those pauses hit harder than the battles. In the reading: icon of quality. The reading calls this a qualisign: an immobile reflecting face expressing a single quality, held for its own sake.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Kong's face in the moments he has nothing to fight. The whole enormous film was built for those seconds.