King Kong glimpse more than enough to weta the appetite

Jackson's gorilla monster looks at first sight like a heavyweight contender for next year's special-effects Oscar. Picture / UIP

The giant ape of Peter Jackson's childhood imaginings has been shown to the world.

The trailer to Jackson's remake of King Kong was seen by a worldwide audience of more than 100 million yesterday.

What's unusual about the trailer and yesterday's release of stills of the film is how much has been revealed so early, including much footage of the titan ape itself.

To say he's an improvement on his screen predecessors - or the one Jackson moulded for his home movie remake as a boy - is an understatement. Just hope the stage of the Academy Awards can take the weight when the big gorilla goes up to get next year's special-effects Oscar.

The giant wetas are a nice touch, a swarm of New Zealand's creepiest insects running rampant on Skull Island and attacking Jack Black.

It's a good in-joke for the home crowd, who now also equate weta as the name of Jackson's props workshop and digital production house.

And showing off so much of the feature's creatures so early is possibly a wise marketing move. There are plenty who think making a third King Kong is a pretty silly idea. It doesn't have the built-in fan base of The Lord of the Rings, though Jackson himself inherited plenty of loyal followers in the wake of the trilogy.

So it's up to a big splash of spectacle to raise the anticipation levels for the December release.

And that's what that first 150 seconds sure delivers, after its initial build-up introducing its leading human cast - Black, Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts.

Hopefully, Watts isn't getting paid by the word. Her only utterance is a scream piercing enough to make the late Fay Wray, the original Kong-shrieker, proud.

Starting on the streets of 1920s New York, the trailer is soon off into the wilds of Skull Island, where the natives look ethnically indistinct but plain scary and there's a rampaging dinosaur on every corner of a jungle which seems built to Kong-scale.

Some of it echoes the look of The Lord of the Rings, whether it's the dark high walls of Skull Island, the ancient map to get there, or all the skulls lying about. It seems Gollum and Kong share the same demented dentist as well as both having actor Andy Serkis behind the motion-capture of their movements.

Jackson told USA Today that he wanted to make "an old-fashioned adventure, a mysterious escapist film like the ones I used to love as a kid. The Tarzan movies or ones with a forgotten world full of dinosaurs".

Any trailer to a mega-production can induce the feeling: So that's all the best bits then, huh? But that first glimpse of King Kong suggests it wasn't such a silly idea after all.

It's more than enough to weta the appetite.

- additional reporting: NZPA