King Kong’s journey from Skull Island to New York City taught a lesson. Specifically, it taught a lesson to other characters in the movie, and in doing so hopefully taught the same lesson to the audience.
King Kong represents a remnant in man. Man has always had the ability to value beauty and happiness and to want to protect it, he just hasn’t always known how to do it. It’s unfortunate that I feel I have to say this in this forum, but I do not mean to imply that humans possess instincts of any kind - only that when acting on blind ignorance they can behave like animals. The final line in the movie “beauty killed the beast” represents a very fundamental choice made by every civilized man in the movie, major and minor, to recognize his higher nature and pledge allegience to it, implicitly renouncing any impulses to the contrary.
This is what was being conveyed at the beginning of the movie when even Miss Darrow steals an apple to feed a desperate hunger, despite her knowledge of right and wrong. When Jack Black’s character saves her from the angry justice of the shopkeeper by flashing a nickle, he is demonstrating civilization’s power to overcome more primitive reactions and to remain civil even in the midst of a Great Depression. Miss Darrow learns this lesson and tacitly admits to it by commenting on the incident.
Soon after Ann Darrow is offered to him, King Kong takes her to a secluded place in the jungle and finally releases her from his grasp. Since she has passed out, he attempts to wake her up so that he may enjoy her. Only once he realizes that this is futile does she recover naturally and proceed to entertain him. This is a dramatization of all that evolution entails; the discovery of the difference between a perceptual and a conceptual conciousness; between forcing beauty and greatness or allowing it to occur naturally. Twice during the movie, once all of the excitement has died down, Miss Darrow shares this point by admiring the sunset with him.
Unwittingly, primitive beings destroy the beauty and joy in life in a frantic attempt to protect it. There are many signs of this throughout the movie up until the point that Kong finally learns this lesson and allows himself to be shot down from the Empire State Building. Many mental health professionals who deal with addiction and dependency recognize a stage in recovery where a profound sense of loss and grief for the old ways will occur within the addict. It is not that the person still believes those ways to be better, but it is a bittersweet recognition of how much was squandered and how frightening the unknown future, devoid of the easy way out, can be. Kong was a living breathing representation of this bad old way, and when he finally realized it and understood it’s permanence within his very identity as a wild animal, he resigned himself to death for the sake of what he loved. It is very telling that immediately after this the heroic Jack Driscoll assends to the top of the building to claim his rightful place.
The only character that doesn’t actually learn anything throughout the movie, but by example does a great amount of teaching, is Adrien Brody’s character - the playwright Jack Driscoll. When on the boat he respectfully understands Mr. Hayes’ explanation of the young shipmate’s theft of his pen, this lesson is being taught. In the dialouge with Miss Darrow where he tells her that she needn’t be nervous around him even though she respects his writing immensly, the lesson of Kong is being understood (himself a representation of civilization in this instance). Presumably, this knowledge is what allowed her to face Kong with the bravery she showed later on.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this perspective is late in the film when Mr. Driscoll explains to an assistant in the theatre that by bringing Kong back to New York Jack Black “is destroying everything he loves and doesn’t even realize it.” What many will think this means is that he is destroying Kong and the mystery and appetite for adventure that Black loves so much, but what is really meant is that bringing Kong back will destroy New York. The rest of the movie is devoted to showing it.
Admittedly, when I watched them first trap Kong and saw Miss Darrow’s opposition to it, I jeered her as being a bleeding-hearted liberal willing to sell her fellow men down the river for the sake of an animal (pardon the Heart Of Darkness/Apocalypse Now reference but I couldn’t help it. Perhaps I should have said “cast her fellow men out to sea emptyhanded” since that’s what they were actually facing). But upon thinking about it, what I realized is that she wasn’t opposing Kong’s capture for his sake, but for the sake of his captors, as well as her own. At this point the movie tells us that King Kong and New York can not coexist; that the “laws” of the jungle and the laws of man are incompatable. A bit earlier, Miss Darrow willingly left the arms of the beast even though she respected it’s power and experienced it’s tenderness. For the sake of her happiness as a human, and not as a savage, she refused to give the beast what it wanted: her. Unlike the savages, who had feared and appeased the beast for god knows how long (their appearance being a visualization of just how ugly fear and ignorance can be), she faced it and tamed it, but plead to keep it in it’s place.
There are many more examples of this lesson throughout this very well-integrated movie (the old male friend of Miss Darrow from Vaudeville is a philosophical gold mine), but I will bite my tounge so that I will be able to show off in later posts - should there be any replies 
I must say that I approached this movie with alot of skepticism and had the same basic attitude that was expressed in the quote of this thread’s original post, but upon seeing it, I will be eagerly adding it to my “Movies worth Owning” list.