A beast of blockbuster

If you're given more than $200 million to make a film, you're going to presume you can indulge yourself a little. And that is precisely what New Zealand's Peter Jackson has done in his three-hour-and-a-bit remake of King Kong, with often masterly results.

Given that Jackson loves the 96-minute, 1933 original enough to say that it inspired him to make movies, it is a little strange, not that the remake is so much more elaborate and detailed, but that it is so long. One of the bull points about Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's original classic is the way it takes Edgar Wallace's story, shakes it down and whips it along with a fast pace that doesn't preclude emotion.

Jackson's film shines a light on all the detail Cooper and Schoedsack left out, including the spider-pit sequence they dropped, and expands and expands and expands. Does it work? Yes - but only once you're past the first hour or so. The unavoidable feeling is that no other director could have moulded the
last two-thirds of the story so well, or made the budget pay for itself so handsomely.

The Thirties Depression years are sketched in with brio and the characters are fleshed out purposefully, with Naomi Watts's excellent Ann, plucked from the chorus line to star in an adventure film, this time falling not for the ship's first mate as in the original, but for Adrien Brody's high-minded screenwriter instead.

Once we arrive at Skull Island - where film-maker Carl Denham (Jack Black) has travelled in a ramshackle tramp steamer to escape the financiers who want to close his movie down - we are treated to state-of-the-art special effects, a tale with enough emotional punch to produce tears in those susceptible, and an underlying critical commentary on the strange process of film-making itself.

Slowly but surely, our amusement at Black's impassioned and amusing filmmaker turns into doubt. He would clearly sacrifice his mother to get a good shot and would do terrible things to Kong to prove he's the greatest showman on earth.

As for Kong himself, the beast is old. He has a thousand scars from fighting for survival against T-rexes, raptors and giant bats, and most significantly of all, he is alone in his dangerous world, which is why he and his captive beauty, who thinks all her shipmates are dead, form such a strong bond.

Everyone knows the plot by now, but it is still possible, as Kong and the girl watch the glowing sunset together from a craggy promontory on Skull Island, or as he climbs the Empire State Building with her, to hope against hope that Jackson will change the ending and save the sad-eyed, snaggle-toothed gorilla.

Of course, he doesn't. But when Brody's lover boy climbs the building to embrace Ann at the end, the feeling persists that even he won't be able to come between the beauty and her beast. There's nothing sexual about it; but there is something that seems quite as strong as the human love-in on view.

Jackson's depiction of Kong and Watts's natural acting (when she is required to do more than merely scream) dovetail to perfection. Which fortunately means that the kernel of the film lies not just in its spectacular nature.