11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Kind of Pointless, really..., November 10, 2005
This review is from: The Island of the Skull (King Kong) (Mass Market Paperback)
King Kong: The Island of the Skull by Matthew Costello
I hate to be one of those people who talks about how he was really into the current big thing long before the big thing was big. Like the people who talk about how they really liked the Ramones back when they lived next door to them in New Jersey and used to hear the practice in their garage, or people who really loved the Richard Bachman novels long before they knew they were actually written by Stephen King. I don't want to be that guy, but long before Peter Jackson made it big with The Lord of the Rings I was really into his movies and I thought he was a stellar talent. The rest of the world merely caught up.
I'm also a really big fan of the original King Kong. Where most film students point to the over praised Citizen Kane as the seminal American art movie, I always point to King Kong. The movie had everything: state of the art special effects, a hot chick in peril, dinosaurs, monsters, panic in the streets and startling sequences that are absolutely and forever unforgettable. It might not be the greatest movie ever made, but it's surly in the top ten.
Remaking the movie was inevitable, and it happened before. Dino De Laurentiis did it in 1976, and it was a complete turd. Kong clambered to the top of the World Trade Centers then, and it's arguably the worst disaster to hit those buildings ever. I remember being a kid and looking at some promotional art for the movie. Kong stood atop the WTC towers, one leg on each, holding an exploding jet plane in his hand. Of course, in the movie Kong wasn't nearly large enough to do this, he had to run and leap from one tower to the next, and he was killed by helicopters. I also remember there being a lot of press built around a gigantic robotic Kong built to scale for use in some scenes in the movie. The robot looked completely lame, completely fake, and nothing like the actor in the suit playing Kong in the rest of the movie. The robot got about five seconds of screen time.
Kong has suffered a lot since the 1933 movie. He gained electrical powers in 1962 and fought Godzilla, and in 1967 had to fight a robot version of himself called Mecha-Kong in King Kong Escapes. (Mecha-Kong was controlled by the villainous Dr. Who, related, perhaps to the British television series?) There was a terrible animated television series based on Kong that had a pretty kicking theme song:
King Kong! You know the name of
King Kong! You know the fame of
King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!
Throughout the land you've heard about this wonder.
Listen closely and you will hear the thunder
Oft this mighty ape and he's a friend of man.
So goes the legend, the legend of...
King Kong! You know the name of
King Kong! You know the fame of
King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!
One day a boy, too young to know the danger;
Made a friend of this giant fearsome stranger!
And the life they led on their island home
Became a legend, the legend of...
King Kong! You know the name of
King Kong! You know the fame of
King Kong! Ten times as big as a man!
Despite all the terrible things that have happened to Kong I'm confident that Peter Jackson will still pull off a spectacular remake. Everything I've seen from the movie so far has been knocking me out. I really think that this will be the big budget Hollywood film we've been waiting for all year. The movie comes out December 14, 2005, which seems a long time.
So I picked up King Kong: The Island of the Skull which is billed on the cover as "The official prequel novel to the Universal Pictures movie event!" It's written by Matthew Costello, whose "...innovative work includes groundbreaking and award-winning novels, games and television shows." If true, all his innovation and ground-breaking would need to be brought to bear on a novel in which none of the main characters can be allowed to meet, the big monster, Kong, can only be heard and not seen, and contains no scenes or ideas that might be better or cooler than the movie to come.
The book bounces around three separate plot-lines. We follow the adventures of Ann Darrow, (played in the movie by Naomi Watts) a down-on-her-luck actress, as she becomes desperate for cash and finds a job diving horses off a pier in Atlantic City and avoids gangsters. Girls diving horses off piers to the applause of paying customers seems weird today, but it's real. See here. (http://www.petticoated.com/pdqwinter04/otherdocs/divinghorsesW04.html)
We also follow filmmaker and adventurer Carl Denham (played in the movie by Jack Black) as he heads up a disastrous expedition to the artic in search of killer whales. His best friend loses a leg to a pack of sea lions, and Jack nearly loses the funding for future projects. Big deal. Both Carl Denham and Ann Darrow have real stories in King Kong. All this is just back story disguised as a novel, somewhat interesting, but rather pointless.
The best part of the book, and the only part that actually matters, is the stuff with Sam Kelly, a former Navy diver who joins an ill-fated Portuguese pearl ship that meets its desperate end near Skull Island, home of Kong. Sam's story is interesting, a does provide some interesting context to what comes later. The map Sam draws will ultimately come into the possession of Carl Denham, and this map will lead the crew to Skull Island and the legendary rendezvous with King Kong.
Three plots may seem like a lot to cram into 328 pages, but it isn't. The story arc of any of these characters would barely qualify as a short story anywhere else. The book is slowly paced, especially at the beginning, and is padded with nonsensical asides and odd thoughts from the characters. Take this bit, from page 51. Ann is in Atlantic City, looking for the famous Steel Pier and a job with the diving horses.
"Is it really steel, she wondered? Why would you make a pier out of steel? Wouldn't wood be better? Or was that just dumb?"
I'd go with just dumb. It's like somebody said fill 300 pages no matter what and the writer just went back over the manuscript over and over again, throwing in any old thing he could think of to spread it out and fill the space. Innovative and ground-breaking indeed.
Books like this are unfortunate. The studio probably knew they couldn't get by releasing the old Joe DeVito adaptation of the original movie, it's been in the public domain for years. They needed something they could stamp their "Official Movie Merchandise" symbol on, and they got it. Unfortunately the novel is pointless and unsatisfying.
Despite this, there are some things that tweaked the fan in me. I love good solid historical details like the diving horses bit at the Steel Pier. I like the historical verisimilitude such details provide. I love it when fictional characters and historical figures interact. At one point in the novel Carl Denham runs into Eugene O'Neill, famed playwright and author of Mourning Becomes Elektra. It's the kind of fun, throwaway scene I wish there were more of.
The second bit that intrigued me is much more sinister and weird. On page 305 a native girl from Skull Island is dying in Sam Kelly's arms"
"She opened her mouth, and said words in her language. `Ka-neh, ry-leh nah.'"
Fans of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories will know what I'm talking about. Ryleh is the island, somewhere in the south seas, where the dread Cthulhu lies, waiting to destroy the world. It's an island of insanity, monsters, and non-Euclidean geometry. Has Matthew Costello slipped a Cthulhu reference into the King Kong mythology? It couldn't be an accident. Costello should know the horror genre, having scripted the video games The 7th Guest and DOOM 3.
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