In the aftermath of his first trilogy, Peter Jackson turns to another gigantic figure. Set in 1933, at the heart of the Depression, the film begins by grounding the myth in scarcity. Its duration takes the time to establish New York misery, economic urgency, and the need for spectacle as an escape. From then on, the expedition to Skull Island is not just an exotic adventure: it extends a logic of predation already present in the city. Carl Denham embodies this ambiguity. Visionary and manipulative, he captures to show, he rips away from the world to produce an image. Jackson films him without outright condemning him, and it is in this restraint that the disturbance is born. By resurrecting Kong through digital means, the filmmaker seems to reflect implicitly on his own practice: creating an image, is it already enslaving what is being filmed? Skull Island then emerges as an archaic world, shrouded in fog and punctuated by hostile verticalities. One can debate 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 the cinema of origins and contemporary digital power. Thanks to Andy Serkis’ performance capture, Kong ceases to be a mere spectacular attraction: his gaze becomes the emotional center of the narrative. The beast acquires interiority, vulnerability, a capacity for hesitation, and gentleness. Facing him, Ann Darrow, portrayed 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 crueller. When Kong is exhibited in New York, chained like an attraction, the film clearly states that modernity turns otherness into merchandise. The ascent to the Empire State Building then concentrates all the meaning of the story. The higher Kong ascends, the more he exposes himself. 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 cannot view in any other way than as a spectacle.
