I can't think of a witty Kong pun

I won’t say too much about King Kong for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it. But I will highly recommend it.

Peter Jackson goes to the source and tweaks it, ever so slightly. His triumph is to bring the settings alive and to add character. Skull Island, even more than Middle Earth, is a place scattered with ruins so old that archaeology has practically become geology – everywhere we see tantalising glimpses of an ancient civilisation, whose descendants now cower in savagery in a barren enclave on the coast. The island is verdant and alive, while they starve out of fear. And the film is more brutally honest about depression-era New York than the original ever was, with shanty towns and soup kitchens at the feet of the nascent skyscrapers.

Jack Driscoll isn’t a hero, he’s a playwright. Ann Darrow is already nine tenths in love with him, sight unseen, because of his writing, in which (yes, really) she discerns qualities that she later also sees in Kong. The two of them both have too much taste to take part in the hideous Kong-o-rama that Denham lays on in New York, yet how they still both end up getting involved makes perfect sense. And Ann Darrow, a woman who can wear only a skimpy satin number on a cold winter’s night in New York and not even goosepimple, makes several unilateral decisions on her own that affect the outcome of the plot. Fay just screamed, as I recall.

Even the supporting characters have life. Carl Denham convincingly shows flashes of a genuinely decent man buried beneath layers of monomania, and I even found a soft spot for the gruff Captain Englehorn, despite my feeling that within the next ten years he’ll be sizing up Allied shipping through the periscope of his U-Boat.

The 1970s Kong is wisely ignored -- though that effort did improve on the original in one respect. In the original, and in this, I couldn't help thinking: how exactly did they transport Kong to New York?

Strangely, though, I thought the film lets itself down with its effects. They are every bit as state of the art, for their time, as the original – but still, like the original, there are moments you’re thinking “Oh, come on”. These usually relate to Kong shaking Ann Darrow like a ragdoll in a way which would snap every bone in her body. Or Ann being so still and rigid in his hands that you suspect it isn’t really her.

But those I could forgive. What I can’t is those scenes where the effects take over and the characters vanish. It’s a sad descent into Van Helsing or Phantom Menace territory – never mind the quality, feel the bandwidth. Digital pixels go mad with digital pixels and you begin to think – so what? Kong has a fight with not one, not two but three dinosaurs ... and he fights ... and he fights ... and he falls down a ravine ... and so do the dinosaurs ... and Ann ... and they fight ... And after a while you really are beginning to fidget and wish something new would happen.

To get the most of Peter Jackson’s Rings films, you need to see the extended editions. Here I felt I had seen the extended edition, and I was wishing I was watching an edited cut. But for all that it is, like the original, a film that gives us so much that lesser film makers will be nibbling off it for years to come.