The City Pages (Minneapolis's kick-ass free weekly) just tore apart the Peter Jackson King Kong flick. The most damning criticism: Jackson basically ignored any real potential for riffing on the multiple symbolisms and allegories.

Considering that King Kong is what supposedly inspired Jackson to start directing movies, that's pretty disappointing. King Kong is an undeniably enduring icon of American pop culture, and one of the few that has such potential for highlighting the oft-ignored downsides of modern society, downsides that our society goes to great lengths to gloss over.

King Kong is nature. Big, powerful, magnificent. The biplanes are humanity. We're small, seemingly insignificant, we make annoying buzzing sounds. We don't take out nature in one attack, but we methodically pursue it over and over, until it falls. We personify Kong as evil, even if it is us that rip him from his place in the world, us that disturb the peace and balance, to make a quick buck.

The icing on the cake is Fay Wray. Helpless and "innocent". The beauty that drives man to achievement, and is the undoing of nature. I guess that's what makes King Kong so legitimate: most people root for him, but he dies in the end. Not your usual sad ending in Hollywood, where Rose still gets to live until she's 99 with a big honking blue diamond (talk about a blood diamond). Kong's dead, and with him, our future, our past, and our souls.

Least that's what I think.