I actually watched this film/DVD last year, but since I just moved to Germany, I am interested in revisiting the film. A few weeks ago, I saw the DVD of this film being sold at several malls in Halle and Leipzig. What immediately comes to my mind is the way how this film has been translated into German since all films (big-screen movies, DVDs, videos) are dubbed into German. As most people have seen, the film relies a lot on verbal comedy that makes fun of the way Germans pronounce and speak English. When the film is dubbed into German, it will immediately lose the funny nuance. Unfortunately, my German is still very limited to be able to understand the dubbing.
I found this film to be hilariously funny, a clever use of language to make fun of some "serious" stuffs such as Nazi-ism, national pride, and capitalist greed. Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane are impressive, but the film relies a lot on the genius Will Ferrel (once played as George W. Bush impersonator on stage with the real G.W. Bush) who plays a dreaming-Nazi-symphatizer.

When I first saw the film in my childhood, I enjoyed it as an entertaining science fiction film about a giant ape pursuing his romantic feeling on a beautiful woman. When I watched the remade film, I had thought that it would be the same film, of course with a more sophisticated techniques of film-making. However, as the film progresses, I begin to realize that this is much more than a fiction of an angry giant ape. King-Kong reminds me of Joseph Conrad's tale in "Heart of Darkness." The film is an allegory of ambiguous encounter between civilization and its Other, the fateful clashes of capitalism, manliness, and the "white-man burden" against the unruliness, savagery, and disarticulated Others. The figure of the beautiful white woman becomes central in this narrative of encounter. She embodies the excess of white, western, and capitalist civilization, and only through this excess the West can reach to the Other, and through which the "savage" could learn and talk to the "civilized" world.

This film is fun to watch. Although the topic has turned out to be a controversial one and invited allegation of blasphemy, some of the historical "facts" could provoke more serious investigations. The most spirited debates over this film stem from the age-old controversy between "fact" and "fiction." However, once we move away from the controversy, we begin to appreciate the most important message of the film, and for that matter, of Dan Brown's original novel. The message strikes our certainty on whatever foundations we believe, including our critical capability in accepting that only blurred boundaries separate the scared from the profan.