Monkey business with Peter Jackson

Remember playing with Silly Putty as a kid? You would take this play clay, stretch it out and flatten it against a comic strip panel from your Sunday newspaper with the hope that the clay would take up the ink from said strip. Then you could stretch and contort said image to your heart's delight.
Well, Peter Jackson had a big container of Silly Putty and he pressed his clay upon the tale of King Kong that came out as a movie in 1933. And he stretched and twisted this icon of a movie into his own version of King Kong in 2005. And the result is a fun movie.
I think what makes this movie excel is the relationship between our heroine Ann Darrow and the giant gorilla. In the previous two movies, we just see two blond ladies scream at the top of their lungs as an oafish ape smiles and paws at them. Here we see a relationship build. PJ makes it a point that Ann and Ape make eye contact and he carries the relationship to the point where Ann scolds the ape like a mother scolding a misbehaving child or where Ann entertains the ape by juggling and doing cartwheels and backflips. So the development of the relationship between woman and beast is more clearly depicted.
Now, as far as the action.......WOW! The dinosaur scenes from this movie would put any dino scene from any of the Jurassic Park movies to shame. I have two favorite scenes from the Skull Island act of the movie (Act II). First, I enjoyed the scene where Denham and Driscoll try to outrace brontosauruses and raptors to safety. The mixing of dinosaurs and humans running was spectacular. Second, Kong battles not one, not two, but three T-rexes in protecting Ann. Again, like in his LOTR movies, Jackson does a marvelous job of blending humans and the digital-generated animals.
And of course, we come to the fight scene between Kong and the bi-planes atop the Empire State Building. Fantastic! Thank God I lived during a time in movies where digital animation makes movies fun.
I think Jackson made this movie for two reasons. First, the original Kong got his creative juices flowing and he wanted to make his Kong version as a way of saying "Thank You" for giving me a purpose in life. Second, I think Jackson suffers from an addiction of applying digital animation to help tell a story and I think he'll go through some serious withdrawal problems if he attempts to tell a story without computer assistance. Methinks he needs to go through a twelve-step program to help him with the addictions.
I decided to use the silly putty metaphor at the beginning of this post because sometimes you can stretch your silly putty too thin. If I do have a complaint on King Kong 2005, it would be that at three hours seven minutes, it's too long in length. (Bilbo Baggins would say "Butter spread over too much bread.") In LOTR, Jackson benefited from the fact that Tolkien saturated the stories with lots of detail. In Kong, Jackson takes the original ninety-minutes of story from 1933 and doubles it, stretching it over three hours. I think the story could have been told in two and a half hours.
I look forward to adding this movie to my DVD collection.