Peter Jackson has got it all wrong. The story of King Kong is not a Lord of the Rings epic but rather a B-movie serial-style adventure, just barely stringing together cheesy acting and a wooden screenplay to bring you violent, imaginative special effects and a roaring Hollywood self-parody. At three hours long and with grand, humanizing ambitions, Jackson's King Kong is misguided in nearly every respect and pales in comparison to the film it seeks the most to honor.

Like the original 1933 film, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Kong's story is great but its script is pure garbage. The changes Jackson and fellow screenwriters Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh made to the original set-up are baffling to say the least. It strains belief that their modifications actually make more hackneyed and less logical the story of a crew of filmmakers going to “Skull Island” to make a film with a giant ape. The first step in this bafflement is having jungle-film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) head to Skull Island just to photograph an unseen spot on the map. What helped the 1933 film rise well above its B-movie roots was that Denham knew they were going to look for Kong, the mythical gigantic monster. He kept the purpose of his mission secret from his crew, but hints and rumors darkened the voyage ahead and cast a sadistic light on the harm Denham wanted to put his crew in. The film was a remarkable testament both to the colonialist curiosity of 1930s documentary filmmakers, as well as a testament to filmmaker bravado, hubris, power, naivety, self-awareness, and sadism. In this earlier film, Denham explained to his crew that his film needed a love story or else people wouldn't come to see it (thus the inclusion of the dull-as-nails human romance, and the more subtle inclusion of the girl-and-ape romance), and the character's explanatory showman-like quality was a wicked acknowledgement of the very qualities the movie King Kong itself had as a draw.

The 2005 film has none of this. Lacking completely is the darkness or mystery implied in the way Denham was going to endanger everyone involved. There is no edge to the new Denham. Black is such a perfect casting choice; his ability to convey the ego-maniacalness of a filmmaker with obsessive and dark ambitions could have invested the film with the necessary "meta-ness" that would suppress its glossy sappiness. Gone are the various discourses on filmmaking, on the primitive and civilization, and on racism (unless, of course, we see the blandness of these discourses in the film as evidence of current society's fear at bringing up such topics, or their assumption that such topics are no longer relevant). At the film’s start—or, more accurately, 40 minutes later when the film crew finally gets to Skull Island—it seems like Jackson is savagely drawing a parallel between the down-and-out Americans of the Depression (shown in a jazzy montage at the film's beginning) and the equally down-and-out Skull Islanders. That the latter have the primitive insight to sacrifice a movie star to appease their Gods and ease their pain is yet another meta-filmmaking metaphor gone up in the wind, as the locals literally disappear after the white men plunge into the jungle after Kong.

Jackson's film seeks solely to humanize Kong, to make him an emotive and motivated character in the film. The reason King Kong lacks the wonder and the darkness and violence of the original is that Jackson's Kong is a good guy. The tribal people on Skull Island do not want to sacrifice vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) to Kong because she is a more exotic replacement for their own young women sacrifices, but rather some unknown motivation. Kong of course falls immediately for Ann, but rather than this being implied simply in his behavior—such as the classic scene in the original where Kong fights with amazing brutality to protect Ann from a T-Rex, a sequence roaringly and brilliantly restaged by Jackson—the animal gets emotive close-up after close-up.

On one hand, the plethora of Kong coverage is a testament to the amazing artistic and technological power of Jackson's CGI team, for Kong's face is so humanistically suggestive, so detailed in character and depth that it is impossible not to lose oneself in the special effects and just assume Kong is another of the film's human stars—a difficult task to accomplish in these days of the kind of gaudy, arrogant CGI showboating evident in much of the rest of the film. On the other hand, Kong gets so much visual attention by way of Jackson ramming home the various emotions and feelings in the beast that it is like someone is hooting a horn and a sign is flashing above the screen: "KONG IS A PERSON TOO, HE CAN FEEL AND THINK AND LOVE AND ACT ON IT JUST LIKE THE REST OF US." Yes, we get it. In fact, we got it just from Kong's behavior. The genius of the 1933 film was that Kong's affection was implied. Ann never consciously acknowledged that Kong was kind and protective to her, but we could tell. Cooper and Schoedsack, with the genius help of Willis H. O'Brien's organic stop-motion special effects, humanized the beast by letting the audience come to their own conclusions about his behavior. In 2005, Jackson does not have such faith in his audience, and Kong gets more melodramatic emotive attention than a whole season of soap opera.

Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad if the film was a lean 90-minute adventure/love story, but no, the film has an endless amount of extraneous footage to flesh out one of the most classical and simple of story arcs (A Journey Into Mystery->The Wonder of Kong on the Island->The Downfall of Kong in Civilization). Ann's non-beast love interest, left-leaning (!) theatre writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is expanded from the original's hokey and knowingly extraneous romance into ridiculous action movie standards (watch for the scene when the scrawny writer jump-kicks an attacking dinosaur while running underneath a stampeding brontosaurus). A subplot with a young and inexperienced boy from the ship and the protective black first mate is thin, needless and discarded without explanation (and is a weird, awkward mirror of the Ann/Kong romance.) With so much time on his hands, it is a wonder how Jackson could leave so many characters so weakly written.

Perhaps the reason is that the film suffers terribly from endless bouts of CGI overkill, a fairly recent blockbuster phenomenon where directors are so freed by computers from the constraints of physical production limitations that they fill the screen and the script with effect after effect. Alongside a drawn-out rumble between Kong and the automobiles of New York City, there are two scenes in particular in King Kong, a brontosaurus stampede and a fight against various gigantic bugs in a crevasse, that are exhaustive in their repetitive showiness. Ironically, the overkill in these last two scenes—the stampede climaxing in what amounts to a dinosaur pile-up, gigantic flesh rolling and colliding and tripping over itself, and the bug scene ridiculously sending wave after wave of every kind of giant insect imaginable at our film's heroes—is one of the rare places where King Kong approaches the self-parody of the original. It is as if Jackson is acknowledging the sheer over-the-top imagination possible with CGI and pushes it momentarily to the extreme. But the world of King Kong is not as expansive and detailed as that of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, and one can only see so much of f/x vistas, dinosaur threat after dinosaur threat, and other jungle samenesses before wishing someone would move along the story or introduce a real, vivid character. There simply is not enough in the story to support an hour long ride on a boat, let alone following that voyage with an hour long hike through dinosaur-infested jungle. Of course, the special effects are not always a negative. The aforementioned Rex vs. Kong battle, where Kong takes on not one but three giant dinosaurs in a frenetic and brutal wrestling bout to shield Ann from danger, is a sight to behold. As is the final sequence, showing a 1930s New York City glistening in the light of a winter dawn as Kong is mercilessly cut down by fighter planes.

Perhaps the objections here wouldn't be so strong if Kong as a character had the mystery and menace, both violent and sexual, of the original monster. He wantonly killed villagers and the boat's crew and women he thought were Ann. Chewed them up, spit them out, stomped on them. He disrobed a swooning Ann one piece of clothing at a time, stroked her and then smelled his fingers. The marvel of that movie was that after all this we still cared for him because he clearly cared for Ann. This new Kong is PCed all over, a sweetheart who only lifts a finger to harm people when they are threatening his Ann. In a truly embarrassing sequence, Kong acts like an audience member-showing boredom and amusement and anger—when Ann put on a vaudeville routine to distract him. The sincerity, earnestness and hubris of Jackson's mission to humanize Kong is simply unnecessary, and the sheer number of shots of the lovely Naomi Watts looking with stunned wonder and appreciation at Kong's affection for showcases just how little faith the director has in what the audience can figure out for themselves. This kind of overly sentimental drivel would never work with two human actors; the audience would rebel at the director cramming such thin emotions of so weakly developed characters so strongly down our throats. Like the Brody character, Kong is a hero with no real faults, so there is no edge to his encounter with Man, Woman, and Civilization. A visual wonder, Kong is the perfection of non-human computer character depiction, a design so thorough and believable that the film is palpably taken with and in love with its own creation. As the epitaph of the film goes, it is the beast's love for beauty that killed him, and it is, in the end, Jackson's love for the possibilities of his computer Kong that kill his film.