Ron Underwood's fast and loose remake of Merian Cooper's and Ernest Schoedsack's Good Ape followup to their King Kong. The ape is good indeed. The sense of scale of the humans to the beast -- smaller and cuddlier than Kong but nimbler as well -- is quite exciting; and the use of low-angle viewpoints for monumentalization is pure textbook. Charlize Theron, as the girl who became a simultaneous orphan with the baby gorilla and grew up alongside him as his personal Sheena, is well photographed, too, with lots of flattering footage, or acreage, of gorgeously tanned shoulders and back. Between the bad-guy poacher who traffics in wild-animal body parts and the wailing little boy at the top of a burning ferris wheel, viewer empathy takes a heavy pounding. Bill Paxton, Rade Serbedzija, Peter Firth, David Paymer. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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