There are few things more beautiful than giant monsters fighting.

Peter Jackson’s new vision of Kong is bigger, badder, darker, faster, and an order of magnitude more spectacular than any Kong before, and it cements his claim to the myth/story mantle squandered by George Lucas. Jackson directs in storytelling Technicolor, as comfortable with character and plot as he is with genre-defining action sequences, exemplary visual effects and great, challenging flights of imagination; he is a moviemaker in his prime, firing smoothly on all 16 precision cylinders.

While the new “King Kong” borrows liberally from both previous movies, it’s not afraid of change. Overall story and setting are from the 1933 film, but those are made more striking in the retelling; in 1933, setting the film in 1933 was just setting it in the present day, but now the story has become a period piece, and depression-era New York has been exotically re-imagined for us with shantytowns and vaudeville shows and long, Model A traffic jams.

Jack Black is giddy, devious fun as movie producer Carl Denham, determined to make his next film on an unknown tropical island (“Failure is only momentary!” he exclaims early on), and Adrien Brody is beguiling as the shanghaied playwright Jack Driscoll. In fact, the movie is full of good characters, and it’s a mark of the attention paid to its characters that when they start getting stomped and chomped, we actually know them well enough to care. Jackson makes portraying a boatful of distinct individuals seem easy.

Naomi Watts glows as Ann Darrow, the woman who wins Kong’s heart. Rather than charming him simply by being blonde and wriggly like Fay Wray (in the 1933 Kong, the island chief is willing to trade six dark-skinned island women for one “golden woman”), or by being camera-enchantingly hot like Jessica Lange as the lithe, sexual creature “Dwan” in the 1976 version, Watts soothes the savage beast with the power of Vaudeville.

This new Kong movie is the least sexual of the three, with audience titillation at a rock-bottom low; certainly, Naomi Watts is beautiful, but her relationship with Kong is based on laughter and play as she juggles and dances for him. When the camera locks onto her face, we’re not staring at her as a female physical ideal—we’re watching her eyes to see what she’s thinking and feeling as she starts to understand Kong, just as the close-ups on Kong show his loneliness as the only giant monkey on Skull Island.

Which bring us to the most compelling character in the film. Like Gollum before him, Jackson’s Kong has a physical presence that we never question, and a charisma and weight that outshines his human co-stars. This “King Kong” is the tragedy of Kong, a story with no heroes or villains, just a lot of funny-looking people trying to get by in a hard world full of dinosaurs and/or hostile rich people.

The most naturalistic and ape-like of the Kongs, he is, at first, the hardest to relate to, the wildest and most animal; but then, over time, he becomes the most dear, with the most believable emotions, exactly because he has been crafted to be as real as we can make him, not just in the animation of his fur but also in the sad, muddled workings of his ape-brain

This is not a remake of “King Kong” at all—not a simple updating or modernization; it is, rather, an adaptation. As with “The Lord of the Rings,” Jackson has taken the source material (in this case, the previous films) and inflated it into something new which is yet faithful to the intent of the original, something that occupies more dimensions than the source though it is built carefully from it, like a laser kicking up a fully-rendered hologram from a thin silver film.

And, by the way, the action sequences are insane roller-coasters of breathtaking delight and awe.

To those who twitch their noses at the three-hour length of the movie, we say you are welcome to go and live your short, efficient lives elsewhere; the rest of us choose to live bigger, longer, fuller lives, lives 40 feet tall and fast as a monkey god.

Kong is dead. Long live Kong.

directed by: Peter Jackson
starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrian Brody, Colin Hanks, Andy Serkis
rated PG-13 for frightening adventure violence and some disturbing images. 

other Kongs: 

‘King Kong’ (1933)
directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

There’s a lot to love in the original “King Kong,” the fabulous tale of an ambitious movie producer who sets sail for an uncharted island to shoot his new movie, only to discover that the island is chock-a-block full of dinosaurs (a la Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” ) eternally at war with the giant ape Kong.

Like many great monster movies, the quality of the visual effects hardly seems to detract from the sense of wonder—sure, Kong looks like a great big hunk of clay, but we buy it because the movie believes in him.

Fay Wray is surely the wriggliest girl ever, and even 70 years later we feel naughty watching Kong pull off pieces of her dress and sniff them.

Other highpoint: watch Kong use wrestling moves on the tyrannosaurs!

‘King Kong’ (1976)
directed by John Guillermin
starring Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, Charles Grodin

The 1976 modernization brought color and a great big ape suit to the Kong legacy, but lost a lot of charm along the way. Instead of filming a movie, the characters now are looking for oil, and somehow Kong then becomes a metaphor for Big Oil, as well as big… umm…

Jessica Lange steams up the camera in her debut as “Dwan” (“Like ‘Dawn,’ you know, except I switched two letters to make it more memorable!”), an aspiring starlet rescued at sea who turns out to be a glistening, undulating, giggling sexual object so stupid that Paris Hilton could be her guardian.

While there’s a lot of good in this Kong movie, the writing takes a hit with the re-make, as do the characters.

High point: when the islanders oil up a big black pole and slide it back and forth through the giant round Kong door-latch.

Low (or high) point?: when the imprisoned Kong emerges from a huge gas pump during an oil company pageant; when Dwan asks Kong his astrological sign.

Unforgivable sin: no dinosaurs.

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