IT'S difficult to go one bigger and better after the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Peter Jackson has managed it with his spectacular remake of King Kong.

The three-hours-plus film is the most expensive movie ever made and is as much a treatise on ambition - both cinematic and personal - as a supremely satisfying action adventure.

Among the crew of the Venture, the ship that carries fillmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) and mostly unwilling crew on his mission to the unmapped Skull Island, is young seafarer Jimmy (Jamie Bell).

The autodidact has a copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to read on the voyage. The book's inclusion is no accident.

The novella speaks of a voyage for a quarry that is as fearful as it is magnetic.

It was also the source for Francis Ford Coppola's seminal war film Apocalypse Now which was so overreaching it almost claimed the life of its star and the mind of its director.

But, if anything, King Kong is not a film possessed of risk. Rather it is an example of a director brimming with confidence and helming a project he cares deeply about.

The Kiwi director actually intended King Kong to be his follow up to 2000's Heavenly Creatures but complications arose and the chance to reimagine Middle Earth filled his time instead.

The three Rings films stand alone as classics but they have also proved a magnificent primer for the effects required to actualise Jackson's vision for King Kong on the big screen.

The detail and range of expression's on the giant ape's face is due to the motion capture technique used to bring the character Gollum to life in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Again the director uses Andy Serkis to base the motions on. The British actor also gets a meaty live action role as Lumpy the ship cook.

Certainly such range of expression helps with the pathos in the relationship between Kong and struggling Vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), whose beauty, and cartwheels, bring out the soft side in the 25ft tall beast.

The special effects once the ship reaches Skull Island are absolutely stunning though some might care that it takes the film a good hour to get to that point.

This is an island time forgot. Dinosaurs roam over it and its dark corners are populated by primordial tenatacled creatures that scared me more than Kong.

Not surprisingly the human population are a fearful, savage lot.

What is best about Jackson's creatures is that none are created with cuteness and would-make-a-great-action-figure-tie-in in mind.

The savages are uglier than the denizens of a Romford nightclub at closing time and some of the Venture's crew are swallowed up by a breed of leech-like creatures so grotesque they're hard to watch.

He might make blockbusters now but Jackson doesn't want us to forget he made his name with low budget gore-fest Bad Taste.

The beauty is in the choreography of the effects. Though there are times when the live action cast are glaringly distinct from the CGI creation going on around them, the set-pieces are endlessly imaginative.

Jackson has scenes to surpass even the mastery of Stephen Spielberg in this regard.

A sequence where Kong battles with a couple of velociraptors while trying to hang on to Darrow lasts close to 20 minutes but is so endlessly imaginative it grips from start to finish.

The live action actors are also impressive. Black is more broadly comic than the rest of the cast but it suits his character's implacable drive - he will do anything to get his film made.

The skinny strong-nosed Adrien Brody is an unlikely leading man in an action film but is all the more watchable and affecting for it.

Still, it is Jackson's film.

King Kong is a breathtaking piece of bravura film making. When Denham repeats the iconic final line from Meriel Cooper's 1933 original film, "It was beauty that killed the beast," it has to be said that in the making of this remake beauty also made the beast. Every last gorgeous frame is a delight.

What are you waiting for?