Jackson (who, along with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, also co-wrote the script, adapted from Cooper and Edgar Wallace's original) knows how to balance lightness of spirit with an almost oppressive ominousness. There are scenes on the island that are terrifying, particularly the crew's first encounters with the native population. If you're looking for anthropology, you won't get it here -- Jackson steps rather gingerly around old-Hollywood notions of "savages" without subverting them. But what he does show us is a group of people who, it's easy to see, have become zombified by their fear. They want to serve Ann up to the beast who rules their island, and we can't blame them: They've been subject to Kong's tantrums for too many years now, and, exhausted and terrorized, they're running out of options.

The most significant problem with "King Kong" is that the crew spends far too much time on that island, outrunning a host of critters that include veggisauruses, aggressosauruses, giant mosquitoes and, most frightening of all, a squad of vicious sea-cucumber-type things that resemble uncircumcised penises outfitted with vagina dentata. These action sequences are intended to rev us up, but they really only weight us down. Because as scary as they are -- and as appealing and blazing sexy as Adrien Brody is, as Watts' romantic counterpart -- all we really want to look at are Ann and Kong.

Because Jackson's "King Kong" is less an adventure than a romance, and it's unapologetic about that truth. The picture was shot by Andrew Lesnie (also the D.P. on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy), and it has a soft, muted glow. Its colors may be vivid, but they're not vibrant -- they're the color of memory. And Watts' Ann, when we first meet her, is like a memory. Of all the movie's characters, she and Kong are the only ones who look to have been transported from another time. (The rest are merely in costume -- which is good enough for them, but still, we can see how they're a world apart.) Watts' Ann, with her strong shoulders, trim hips and endless legs, looks just right in Depression-era clothes, like a fashion sketch come to life. But it's her face -- particularly the way her eyes always seem to be looking for home -- that doesn't seem to know, or care, what time it is.

As Denham observed, she may very well be the saddest girl you've ever met, a match for the saddest monkey. When Kong first sees Ann, he fingers her satiny blond hair with a clumsy thumb and forefinger. He's a big galoot with no manners -- he thumps his chest with macho overexpressiveness, unaware that he has anything else to say -- and once Ann gets over her considerable fear of him, she sets out to teach him a thing or two about actually talking to a girl. She uses some of her old vaudeville tricks to amuse and distract him, and also simply to prove that, somehow, she can get the better of him. She juggles; she turns cartwheels; she does a funny Egyptian dance. Kong, amused, responds by knocking her down, which he thinks is incredibly funny. She upbraids him for it; he turns away from her in a huff. Kong is just learning that animal attraction is nothing; when it comes to love, it's communication that really matters.

This Kong is a vision lifted straight from our dream life at the movies -- certainly not from our real lives -- and yet he seems vividly alive. With his heart-shaped nose, he's a simian valentine to a lost world. In the 1976 version, director John Guillermin gave us Kong as a tragic, poetic hero, an idea Jackson expands: When Kong is captured from the island, the last thing his drowsy eyes see is Ann, in tears over his suffering. The scene is so operatically painful, it's almost impossible to watch. This is Jackson's way of signaling what we all know is to come -- that Kong will meet his end at the top of the Empire State Building, and Ann will bear witness to his suffering. But before that happens, Jackson gives us one image to cling to: Kong, after scooping up and discarding a number of generic-looking New York City blondes, has finally reconnected with his blonde. He makes a place for her in the palm of his massive hand and heads for the park -- it's nighttime, and the city has grown blessedly, and unaccountably, quiet -- only to realize that he can't walk across the icy pond at its center. So he does what any resourceful giant ape would do: He sits on his butt and he slides across, whirling and twirling on the ice with Ann, his dance partner, safe in his grasp. Kong is the very big ape at the center of a very big movie, but here, he feels unaccountably small. He's everything we come to the movies for, and as overwhelming as he is, he never lets us forget that less is more.

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