From the moment the first opening credit appears on the screen, Peter Jackson's new version of King Kong announces its debt to its predecessor. Using a font and background strikingly similar to those in the 1933 original, Jackson opens his film as an homage to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's classic, and it's in the shadow of that film that he works for the three full hours of his remake. Jackson's reverence for source material served him well in his triumphant Lord of the Rings trilogy, but in Kong it benefits him less, since he's not translating a story from one medium to another but merely telling the same story in the same medium, only more so.
"More" is the watchword for Jackson's film, which is almost twice as long as the original, and as you might imagine, spends about twice as long on every detail as it ought to. Jackson takes fleshing out the story to an extreme, holding back the titular giant ape (played via motion capture by Andy Serkis, Lord of the Rings' Gollum) until over an hour into the film. Before that, we learn all about shyster movie director Carl Denham (Jack Black), who is about to have his financing cut off before he can head off to a mysterious island to film his latest picture. His star has dropped out, so at the last minute he casts starving (literally; it's the Depression) stage actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), narrowly avoids the cops and sets out into uncharted waters.
He's joined by a motley crew that includes reluctant screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), a wiry, bookish man who prefers the theater to moving pictures. Once at their destination (invitingly named Skull Island), the crew discovers nasty natives, dinosaurs, giant bugs and a certain overgrown simian with a fetish for blondes. Kong roars and leaps and abducts Ann, leaving the suddenly intrepid Jack and the opportunistic Carl, along with plenty of crew-member cannon fodder, to rescue her.
Eventually Kong makes his way to New York City so he can make the iconic climb up the Empire State Building. That image is so indelibly printed on our cultural consciousness that people often forget that the Kong-in-New York scenes constituted barely 20 minutes in the original movie. As he does with everything, Jackson pads out this epilogue, and offers even more padding in the lead-up and centerpiece scenes on Skull Island. Since he adheres so closely to the storyline of the first film, even setting it in the same time period, Jackson creates a peculiar hurry-up-and-wait feel, and longtime Kong fans may be impatiently awaiting the next plot development that they already know is coming.
This is not to say that Jackson doesn't provide some riveting sequences along the way, and even improvements on the original film in certain capacities. The old Jack Driscoll was a bland, square-jawed hero—the ship's first mate—and by making Jack a writer, Jackson has created a much more interesting and plausible love interest for Ann. The problem, then, is that Jack is no longer the hero, nor are any of the human characters. This time around, it's the soulful, melancholic Kong who's the star of the show, and that's the one area in which the leap in special-effects technology has really allowed Jackson to do something Cooper and Schoedsack could not. Their stop-motion Kong could never have registered so many emotions, and thus could not have portrayed the complex and surprisingly romantic relationship he has with Ann in this film, nor could the ape have been afforded a death scene worthy of Laurence Olivier.
With both the technological and emotional foci on Kong, Brody is easily edged out as the relatively useless Jack, and Black plays Carl as mostly comic relief. Watts, who's got two of the most expressive eyes in cinema, holds her own with Kong, not a mean feat considering he's 25 feet tall. She radiates beauty and old-style glamour, and successfully conveys the combination of compassion and fear Ann feels for Kong.
For all of the astounding spectacle he achieves, Jackson is guilty of rampant overindulgence, and as with Tim Burton's recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, his film has a certain "so what?" feel. He spends three hours letting us know that King Kong is his favorite movie. His version is made with consummate imagination and skill, but it's still largely superfluous.