Ligia and I bought Mighty Joe Young (1998) on DVD a while back, and it sat in our library, waiting to be viewed, for a few months. We finally got the chance to see it tonight. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but we were rather pleasantly surprised. It’s what I would call a good movie. The plot, although a bit thin in some spots, was tied together well. The characters were believable where it mattered. It was easy to root for Joe, Gregg O’Hara (Bill Paxton) and Jill Young (Charlize Theron). We have a simple litmus test: if we can sit down to enjoy the movie without being bothered by the way it was made, then we like it. This movie passed the test just fine.

The best part of the movie was Joe Young himself – a huge, artificial gorilla that its creator, Rick Baker, somehow managed to make very believable. The movement (gestures, facial grimaces, walk and stride) seemed very natural. It was very easy to forget Joe was not real and actually see him as Joe, a gigantic gorilla very out of his element in Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, this movie was nominated for an Oscar because of its great special effects.

This 1998 version is a remake of an original 1949 movie, made after a screenplay by Ruth Rose. The original story was written by Merian C. Cooper, who also developed and produced the original King Kong (1933). Somehow I think the gorilla in this movie looked and behaved much better than the original stop-motion figurine in the 1949 version — although there’s a certain element of nostalgia that’s associated with those special effects.