He isn't pretty, but he is enormous. And he has the grace of a Sumo wrestler when battling three Tyrannosauruses who are trying to take away his favorite toy. When he finally kills one of them -- seemingly disappointed at first that all the fun is over -- he plants one foot on the giant dinosaur, beats his chest with his fists and emits a roar of victory that shakes the very earth he stands on. In his realm, King Kong is indeed the king.

But where could he have learned this victory pose? Perhaps from a scene filmed a cinematic eternity ago -- a scene depicting a pair of police officers posing for a photograph next to the dead body of King Kong. The scene, of course, comes from the first version of the movie and King Kong's triumphant pose above the dead Tyrannosaurus in director Peter Jackson's new remake comes with a message: The giant ape didn't deserve that much humiliation back in 1933.

Indeed, Jackson has created a blockbuster that is reverently and passionately dedicated to the 1933 horror classic. And it is suffused with a delicate irony. The opening scene is already a nod to the audience: A pair of cute little Capuchin monkeys removing lice from each other's bodies at the Bronx Zoo. Only then does the camera pan across slums and over to Manhattan, where the story begins.

The giant gorilla King Kong is the rarest of cinematic creatures -- a character with which millions of people around the world are intimately familiar, even without having seen the film. The primordial beast originates in a dream, a figure that seems to personify a collective human fear. There is something archetypical about King Kong, more so than, for example, Count Dracula or Frankenstein's monster. Unlike these classic cinematic fiends, King Kong is not a product of the horror literature of the 19th century, but rather an original beast of the silver screen. It's no accident that his adversary in the film is a movie director, a man the film depicts as a sort of magician's apprentice who soon finds himself in over his head when it comes to dealing with the monstrosity he has released.

Collatoral damage on the way to a spectacle

New Zealand director Peter Jackson, 44, once better known for his horrid little horror films, has now joined Tim Burton as one of the grand masters of the cinematic spectacle. Indeed, King Kong has been one of Jackson's favorite movies since childhood, and he began developing plans for a remake as far back as 1996.

But it was only on the heels of "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which earned close to $3 billion at the box-office worldwide and brought the Jackson team a total of 17 Oscars, that Jackson has finally been able to realize his dream. Jackson's three-hour "King Kong," at a production cost of at least $200 million, is one of the world's most expensive movies, not far behind "Titanic," and is expected to achieve record box-office returns in the Christmas season. And given "King Kong's" size, what on earth should stand in its way?

Of course, "King Kong" lacks the majestic quality of "Lord of the Rings." Somewhere along the way, the film's compelling action leads Jackson to discard secondary storylines and characters that he patiently develops at the film's beginning. But such collateral damage is the price we pay for three hours of billowing spectacle.

The story of King Kong, as it was developed by filmmaker Merian C. Cooper some 75 years ago, is the story of a shady film director named Carl Denham who, together with his camera crew and blonde female lead, embarks on an expedition to shoot a horror film starring a real monster that supposedly lives on a mysterious island "west of Sumatra." But once on the island (which is also home to dinosaurs and various other nightmarish creatures), the blonde is kidnapped by the locals and taken as a sacrifice to the giant gorilla, which the islanders worship and fear as a man-eating deity. The film crew manages to liberate the blonde and capture the monster, which they then plan to take back to New York, where it will be the featured attraction, an "eighth wonder of the world," in a sort of jungle revue.

The notion that the film is nothing but cheap sensationalism was irrelevant in 1933 and remains irrelevant today. What made "King Kong" such a success in 1933 and gave it a guaranteed slot in our collective cinematic memory is the deep ambivalence of the story itself. It embodies the memory of man-eating idols like Baal, man-eating monsters like the Minotaur and every dragon that has ever populated the pages of myths and popular fairy tales -- all creatures that repeatedly and constantly demanded virgin sacrifices.

Animating the original Great Ape

But it also embodies an erotic fantasy involving equal doses of fear and pleasure, as well as the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast (although King Kong is no fairy tale prince). The giant black ape defies classification as either good or evil; in his primordial power, he is innocence personified. Merian C. Cooper, a brute in other respects, made sure the ape develops a tender attraction to the white woman he holds like a toy in his hollow hand, and that he dies an honorable death in the end, when he is attacked by a squadron of fighter planes while perched on the tip of the Empire State Building. Cooper himself played one of the pilots who shoot down the ape.

Cooper was the child of wealthy Southerners, an educated adventurer, a passionate fighter plane pilot and an amateur when it came to making films. As a member of a squadron of fighter pilots in the 1920 Polish-Russian war, he met slapstick cameraman Ernest B. Schoedsack. Then, in the 1920s, the two men shot two exciting ethnographic documentaries -- one set in Persia and the other in the Siamese jungle, for which 300 elephants were purportedly gathered.

In 1932, animation magician Willis H. O'Brien joined the team as its third creative mind, for the filming of "King Kong." At the time, O'Brien had spent 15 years more or less single-handedly perfecting the frame-by-frame recording technique, using puppets and models, and the new animation techniques he and Cooper developed (while Schoedsack, as the director, was in charge of the acting scenes) made "King Kong" an epochal showpiece in the history of animation.

And, it is an animation technique that is making a comeback today. Both Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" and the film "Wallace & Gromit" by Nick Park and Steve Box use the frame-by-frame technique. Jackson's "King Kong," however, takes full advantage of the wealth and finesse offered by the latest in computer animation. Anyone who has ever doubted that a computer-generated creation could possess an immortal soul should take a close look at this new King Kong.

King Kong to the rescue

When "King Kong" premiered in New York in March 1933 (in two movie theaters with a total of 10,000 seats), the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. Across the country in Hollywood, the studio bosses came together in an uncharacteristic show of unity and issued a joint appeal to their employees, asking all those with higher salaries to agree to a 50-percent pay cut for eight weeks. Otherwise, they argued, the entire studio production system would collapse. The appeal was successful, Hollywood survived the crisis, and the sensational success of "King Kong" saved its virtually bankrupt production company.

Peter Jackson uses the 1933 Great Depression, along with images of welfare lines and starving people digging through garbage cans, as the realistic backdrop for the later ascent of "King Kong" into the fantastic. Despite appearing to remain true to the 1933 storyline, Jackson shifts the film's focus from the very beginning. Instead of revolving around the dashing filmmaker -- played by Jack Black as an overblown windbag -- the story centers on the young actress Ann Darrow -- played by the wonderfully soulful Naomi Watts -- who has lost her miserable job in a vaudeville show. She prefers starvation over the alternative -- working in a strip joint. But as life would have it, she eventually agrees to join Denham's desperado-like expedition into the seas of Southeast Asia.

Jackson (together with his experienced screenplay and production partners, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) has elegantly banished all concerns that the raw "King Kong" material might not appeal to a female audience by sweetening the film's horror with melodrama. Jackson's "King Kong" is the story of a confident and courageous young woman who falls into an immense, completely unparalleled romantic adventure, and also happens to stumble upon the love of her life (in the form of Adrien Brody) in the process.

In contrast to the old King Kong, who occasionally stuffs a wriggling human into his mouth, Jackson's new beast is a strict vegetarian -- a case of political correctness in the field of zoology. This chasteness deprives the monster of its mythical darkness, making it implausible that the locals would be terrified of the beast and offer him human sacrifices.

The laugh of a beast

But what the film gains in return is compassion. This new "King Kong," in all of his innocence, is also an entity unto himself, with no meaning beyond himself. He too is an "eighth wonder of the world," the showpiece of a colossal jungle revue. The chases and the fight scenes are of an imaginativeness and technical innovation that, quite frankly, has never before been seen in the cinema -- hardly surprising with such a perfectionist virtuoso as Jackson.

But the boldest gambles Jackson takes with the black beast and the blonde woman are two very real love scenes. In the first, Ann, overcoming her mortal fear, vies for the animal's attention by performing her dreary little vaudeville acts -- hopping, juggling and turning somersaults -- and ultimately coaxing a laugh of sorts from the beast, one that comes across as both horrific and somehow warm-hearted.

In the other "duet," this time in New York, the starlet and the beast skate circles around each other on a frozen pond in Central Park, with the lights of Christmas trees sparkling in the background. These playful moments reveal every aspect of a yearning for love, of joy and of happiness one could fantasize exist in the head of such a creature -- at a point when the viewer already knows that the next morning will bring death. It's the kind of glorious illusion that otherwise exists only in the opera: We don't have to believe it to be moved by it.