King Kong

Peter Jackson embraces excess with his dazzling, three-hour remake of monster classic 'King Kong'.

Herald rating: *****

It is a movie in its own right, a Hollywood rags-to-riches tale that could only be filmed by Ron Howard starring Tom Hanks. As the calendar clicks over to 1970, a 9-year-old boy sits in front of his family's TV set on the far side of the world, transported by a late-night rerun of the classic, King Kong. He cries.

In the final reel of our movie, the calendar clicks over to 2004 and the little boy has become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He has more Oscars than he has mantelpieces. He meets the frail and failing Fay Wray, star of that flickering black and white movie, within months of her death. He cries.

Some of us were puzzled when Peter Jackson announced that he and Fran Walsh would follow their Lord of the Rings triumph with a remake of King Kong. Why? we thought. But the master film-maker was one step ahead, to borrow from certain other Kiwi icons. He could reference his roots and he could strut his stuff, in one flick.

He could pay tribute to the vision of Kong as his inspiration to make movies, and create another blockbuster, with his signatures of great screenplay, strong acting and dazzling special effects.

The story is straightforward, Beauty and the Beast. New York in 1933, the grim Depression times that were also the backdrop for Russell Crowe's Cinderella Man. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is a vaudeville actress whose company has gone bust: she may have to turn to stripping.

Carl Denham (Jack Black) is a D-movie director whose latest flick is so bad it's unlikely to see even the cutting-room floor. Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) wants to be a serious playwright. Or a movie writer. Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler) is a B-movie actor who'll take any role if it will give him a ticket to the West Coast sunshine.

Denham connives this crew, ill met by starlight, into his obsession - filming the last uncharted island in the world. They board a tramp steamer for the South Seas. Ann and Jack grow close. They pitch up on Skull Island, where prehistoric creatures pursue the humans. They are chased over bridges and logs above chasms, fall from great heights, have to grab at rocks and trees to save themselves, interact with a cardboard cut-out cast of locals. Parallel survival stories unfold: the peripheral humans and the ageless beings; Ann and the most noble savage.

For reasons that we will not spoil here, they return to New York for the final showdown at the Empire State Building.

So many themes and storylines are unfolding here that it is impossible to trace them all. The path of film-making, perhaps? The first King Kong was a cheap monster movie, made for US$600,000 in a matter of weeks. Jackson had a budget of US$207 million ($336 million) and, arguably, a 35-year timeline. Willis O'Brien was the father of special effects. Jackson is his most accomplished son. The original King Kong blazed a trail for Jaws, Jurassic Park (O'Brien's first special effects movie was The Lost World in 1925), Alien and so on. A path that leads to the Lord of the Rings or ... King Kong, in Jackson's "nothing succeeds like excess" vision, more than three hours long.

Jackson and Weta studios' computer-generated images and work with miniatures are stunning. Fresh from his triumph as Gollum, Andy Serkis repeats his creepy-crawling then Jackson added a gorilla's body via computer.

But above all the special effects and the computer effects, Jackson and Walsh create a remarkable love story between Beauty and the Beast that succeeds on a heightened emotional, and tragic, level.

Following from the movie, the 2-DVD set is Jackson's third on the subject. He and his crew walked movie buffs through the making of the original film and then released the detailed Production Diaries of his version to coincide with the theatrical release late last year.

Perhaps that is why this set drags. After the "history" of Skull Island (mostly drawings created to provide a backstory) and an interesting documentary on New York in 1933, you get two-and-a-half hours of the Post-Production Diaries. These are 35 features that were originally posted on the movie website to whet fans' appetites prior to the big-screen release. Jackson and crew comment on the unfolding process of film-making, clips show various departments working through the post-production stages.

* DVD, Video rental today