The King of Kong

KING OF KONG is one of the greatest movies I've seen in a while - not documentaries, movies. The film-making here is nothing short of extraordinary - building suspense, creating anticipation, and playing with the archetypes like the best Hollywood movies.

If you have ever played the original Donkey Kong arcade game, or on the original Nintendo, you have to see this movie. I have never beaten Level 3 on the third cycle - the spring on the elevator stage, if you know what I'm talking about, is going extremely fast. These guys get beyond 20 cycles.

I don't want to give anything away...I heard they are going to make this a feature movie with actors, but I think that eliminates the main draw of this concept - these guys are in their forties, in some freak cases have wives and children, and they play Donkey Kong with as much heart as Lance Armstrong rode bikes. They are some of the strongest characters I've seen in a movie since STAR WARS. To best summarize how enjoyable this movie is, after watching the DVD for the first time, I immediately restarted it from the beginning, and watched it again.

As entertainment, King of Kong is quite good, portraying a strange insular world of video game fanatics and a good vs. evil story of a scrappy newcomer fighting to win the record from its sleazy holder.

But as a documentary, it is quite possible that almost everything in it has been twisted in pretzels to fabricate a story.

After I saw the documentary I looked in up on wikipedia, where I saw some fairly shocking claims regarding what the movie altered and left out. I went to the Twin Galaxies website and read more.

Of course, since Twin Galaxies and Billy Mitchell (I found an interview with him in AV Club) are portrayed negatively in the movie there's a possibility that they aren't telling the truth, but since some of the most important claims would be common knowledge within the classic arcade gaming community, they would ruin their reputation by lying, and be instantly refuted, so I have to lean towards believing them.

This is quite frustrating. The movie is entertaining. And it is fascinating to see how seriously people take this tiny little world. But if what Twin Galaxies claims is true, then I was totally mislead on what was going on, and I basically can't trust a single thing in the movie.

Documentaries, in my opinion, should strive to tell the truth more than to tell a good story. King of Kong tells a good story, but its relationship to the truth is highly suspect.

This is an incredible documentary, and as with most great documentaries the story arises as the filming happens; it is not preconceived. The film starts out as a story about a battle between two gamers who each want to hold the donkey kong high score records, but what it turns into is a story about man vs. the empire(and not in a star wars sense). It is a story about how who you know is always everything and how much harder an everyman must work to make it in a world of networks. The story of these people, especially steve's, are really inspiring and you find yourself feeling all of the twists and turns of the film along with the characters. A truly wonderful film about human beings not just donkey kong.

Though this geeky arcade fighting flick may remain an acquired taste, The King of Kong feels like one of the more entertaining documentaries to emerge in years. Even though you would think the chief demographic of forty year old virgins and basement-ridden, antisocial, hardcore, old-school gamers would flip the bill, Kong immediately offers so much more on so many different levels of psychological and sociological intrigue that anyone not self-conscious enough to feel embarrassed for investing an emotional stake into a Donkey Kong showdown, (highlighting a bittersweet anti-climax) will find themselves deep inside a world they never thought imaginable.

The mock-epic tone, which so many supporting characters delightfully contribute to, feels seized by director Seth Gordon and infused into his charming take on good-vs-evil, letting this potentially inspiring metaphor stretch it's wings into a blossomed, well-rounded quirk-fest far more fun then it's rigorous gaming pedigree would suggest.

King of Kong (or Billy vs. Steve, basically), is an excellent film about a rivalry that says a lot about competition in our culture. The movie portrays Billy, the Donkey Kong Champion, doing everything in his power to keep his record and to deny Steve Wiebe (wee-Bee) the title of world record holder in Donkey Kong. Steve is an outsider in this culture where Billy is an icon, and at first there are people within the video game community who do not want him to succeed. It becomes kind of a struggle between good and evil, as the powers that be try to hold down those not in power. Suddenly, Steve is the guy you're rooting for, if only just to beat that smart-ass Billy. It is a journey that takes you through the darker and seedier side of the video game revolution of the '80s. If it seems silly to be writing about such weighty issues of good and evil when a movie is about a video game, watch the movie: it really does the job of making you care about what happens to these odd, fascinating people.