Peter Jackson's King Kong is that rare Hollywood achievement: A remake that honors and finally bests the original film (it also consigns Dino De Laurentiis' disastrous 1976 remake to the shelf holding Toho classics like King Kong vs. Godzilla).

As with his vision for The Lord of the Ring trilogy, Jackson seems to have delved into all the texts, history, and source material surrounding the original 1933 RKO film, and so has invested his Kong with a surprising richness and depth. It's an adventure film with a moral, as exciting and suspenseful as it is thoughtful. Plus, it's often very humorous.

Jackson faithfully follows the 1933 synopsis of Merrian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace. An egomaniacal filmmaker, Carl Denham (a jab at director Robert Flaherty), takes off into the uncharted South Pacific to discover the mysterious Skull Island. Once there, his group, including hardscrabble blonde Ann Darrow and adventurer Jack Driscoll, are taken hostage by the natives, and Darrow is soon being offered up as a sacrifice to the island's master, Kong. But Darrow wins Kong's heart, and after various scrapes, the great ape is subdued and shipped to New York City as a sideshow attraction. But haunted by Darrow, Kong escapes to find her, and the two, once united, find themselves at the pinnacle of the Empire State Building.

With these bones of a "beauty and the beast" tale, Jackson begins to layer flesh upon it, and the tack he takes is immediately apparent. To Al Jolson's roaring of the doubly ironic "Sitting on Top of the World," we enter a Manhattan Hooverville at the height of the Depression, where families live in match-wood shacks, and where soup lines are all that keep the populous from starvation. It's the first jungle Jackson leads us into: capitalism's neon jungle of mass suffering and Art-Deco dreams.

On the lam from studio bosses who want to scrap his adventure movie, Carl Denham (Jack Black) jumps on a tramp steamer with his crew, his screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), and his new leading lady, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), an unemployed Vaudevillian. They're soon sailing into the heart of darkness, to Skull Island and its own insatiable jungle.

Jackson's King Kong possesses all the computer-generated trappings of the average Hollywood blockbuster, down to close encounters of the Jurassic Park kind. But Jackson wryly uses spectacle to critique spectacle. Not for nothing does Skull Island light up as if by Klieg lights for the premiere of "Ann Darrow as sacrifice."

The need for entertainment is not that different between jungles, where a woman tied to two stakes or an injured great ape fettered in chains is a top-of-the-bill draw. Jackson even turns his criticism back on us at the end, when new lovers Darrow and Driscoll greet sunrise with a lip-lock at the crown of the Empire State. Well, it's what the punters pay for, isn't it?

The detail throughout Jackson's film is extraordinary. The rusted tub that cast and crew embark upon is filled with references to Conrad, Jack London's Sea Wolf, and Melville (is that Queequeg who flashes by in the ship's corridor?).

This same keen eye has been applied to the characters that transcend matinee serial thinness for something multidimensional. Jackson has again assembled a first-rate cast, with Watts more than earning Fay Wray's mantle (Jackson had wanted Wray to appear in a cameo role in his film, but the original Ann Darrow wasn't up to it. But Jackson pays homage to the recently deceased Wray throughout the film). Turning the adventurer Jack Driscoll into a serious Federal Theater Project playwright was a clever choice on Jackson's part, and Brody does a fine job of becoming this Clifford Odets on steroids. As the conniving and mercenary Denham, Black perfects a mad glint in his eyes that reminds you of what pathology is capable of with a little technology at its disposal.