It’s hard to get more conclusive than the end of King Kong, regardless of the version. John Guillermin’s 1976 remake had Kong shot multiple times before he took his long fall off the World Trade Center, and what little pathos the movie had came from watching the poor beast get slaughtered. Bringing him back for another round is questionable enough, especially considering King Kong Lives was released a decade after the previous film. But the explanation as to how the monster survived is even more ludicrous. Kept alive by a college trying to raise its public profile, Kong is in a coma at the start of movie, waiting for an artificial heart transplant. Linda Hamilton, two years off of The Terminator, plays his fresh-faced, bafflingly dedicated surgeon, and the story follows her attempts to save a giant ape who killed dozens of people during his last rampage, and will almost certainly go on to kill more. Animal preservation is one thing, but the almost unimaginable cost in money and time of such a doomed-to-fail venture is hard to accept, especially when the movie uses it as an excuse for sentimentality, potshots at the military, and broad stereotypes.
