King Kong
Coming off of his astounding Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson's King Kong remake is a painstaking work of adoration and admiration for the 1933 original, which captured his imagination when he first saw it as a young boy. But he and writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens were also smart enough to recognize the one-dimensional characters and emotional limitations of the original's script, which merely calls for Ann Darrow to scream in terror at Kong the entire film. To great success they have managed to incorporate a relationship between beauty and the beast, which was attempted and failed miserably in the first remake in 1976. The reason it actually works here is two-fold: Naomi Watts is simply mesmerizing; and an incredibly rendered Kong, whose facial expressions, emotions and raw athleticism permeate the film thanks to some impressive CGI work and his "stand-in," Andy Serkis, who seems to have his own cottage industry going with Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films and now Kong.
While certainly entertaining, Kong is far from a great movie. First of all, it's way too long, taking more than three hours to tell a story the original accomplished in 90 minutes. Jackson's verve to pay homage to that film led him to recreate the legendary spider-pit sequence that was removed from the 1933 version and lost to the great film vault in the sky. Unfortunately the result is a stale action sequence that slows down the film and only serves to gross-out the audience and kill off another handful of characters.
Meanwhile, for all the great effort spent adding depth to Darrow's depression-era starving actress and her relationship with the giant ape, just as little seems to have been paid to the other characters. With all that running time available, desperate filmmaker Carl Denham (played with gusto by Jack Black) and Darrow's human love interest, Jack Driscoll, should have been more than just bystanders by the film's end. Nevertheless, "it was beauty killed the beast," and Jackson's ability to coax true emotions from the bond between a woman and a giant, computer-generated ape is a true accomplishment.