King Kong 2005!

The big gorilla at the box office (and on the Empire State Building) this week is King Kong, Peter Jackson’s loving homage to the original 1933 stop-motion classic about beauty and the beast, a huge ape captured and brought to New York City to be exhibited.

Remaking the film is truly a monstrous undertaking, but if anyone can do it, it’s Peter Jackson, the force behind one of the most spectacular and commercially successful trilogies in all of cinema: The Lord of the Rings saga. The studios who took a gamble on the rotund, bespectacled Kiwi's vision were repaid handsomely, to the tune of nearly three billion dollars of revenue. Jackson became fabulously wealthy, but more importantly he gained directorial autonomy and the power to command studio backing. He probably could have written a script about animated earwax and gotten a studio’s check for $50 million to make it.

Budgeted at over $200 million, the new King Kong is quite a spectacle (and at three hours in length, filmgoers will get their money’s worth). Much of the special effects work was done in Jackson’s home country of New Zealand, which has experienced an explosion in filmmaking due entirely to the diminutive director’s cinematic passion. Jackson began his career making bizarre, low budget horror and splatter gems like Bad Taste, Dead Alive, and Meet the Feebles, as well as the overlooked Kate Winslet film Heavenly Creatures.

King Kong is everything you expect: Action! Romance! Tragedy! And, of course, an eye-popping, animated ape. There’s plenty of symbolism in the film, but at its heart, the film is popcorn munching fun. Truth be told, King Kong’s cast is a little shaky: School of Rock’s Jack Black overacts as Carl Denham, a shady filmmaker. Sad-eyed Adrien Brody plays shanghaied screenwriter Jack Driscoll, with more than a passing interest in Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts, in the Blonde Beauty role vacated by the late Fay Wray). Acting opposite make-believe special effects is never easy, and Watts brings heart to her performance. If Kong’s movements seem faintly familiar, it’s because the beast is played, more or less, by Andy Serkis, who provided the voice and movement for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. Using motion-capture photography, Serkis used his months of gorilla research to give life to Kong.

King Kong’s home of Skull Island was filmed almost entirely using miniatures, and the film boasts about 800 computer generated shots—a fantastic (and fantastically labor-intensive) endeavor. The effort returns handsome dividends; King Kong is amazingly realistic and even manages to convey emotions. King Kong is not a perfect film—it could have been about twenty minutes shorter, and some of the battles get repetitive-—but it is very good.