"And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead."

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I am sitting in a darkened theatre, my heart is gently pounding and I’m nervously scribbling down notes. I want to capture the moment, the feelings, the anticipation of waiting to meet the man I’ve been dreaming about for the last twenty years. The room is about to go completely dark and there are so many questions zooming through my head. What will the Aborigines look like? Will the story stay true to the first or second? The effects, what will he look like? How will Naomi Watts play Ann Darrow?

The film opens in Depression era New York. There is a hungry man holding a Pug in the opening scene. I’m already hooked and anxious to meet the big guy. But we have to wait, quite a while. Peter Jackson spends the first 70 minutes introducing us to the human characters, laying foundation for later scenes.

We meet Ann, a starving vaudeville actress who has just lost her job. She soon crosses paths with Jack Black who for me was the biggest surprise of the film. I admit I went in skeptical about how such a dry comedian could play the role of a larger than life obsessed filmmaker. But within 2 minutes after he takes to the screen I found myself wondering who else could have possibly played Carl Denham any better. He was devilishly funny but wickedly evil, making you love and hate him all at once.

I felt Adrian Brody was oddly cast as Ann's love interest. Their romance was lackluster never really going anywhere. You wanted her to be with the ape and forget about him. To the point when he shows up to rescue her while she is sleeping cozily in Kong’s hand, in what I felt was one of the most touching and poignant moments of the film, you actually resent him for being there to break up their love nest. At least, I did...

There was an awesome dinosaur sequence that seemed to last a good 30 minutes and leads into the above mentioned pivotal scene of the movie. The effects were amazing, the script was clever, witty, and heart wrenching. Kong looked exactly the way he did in my head. His body was more gorilla-like than his predecessors, but his face was more expressively human than any other cinematic monster to date. It was as if Peter Jackson jumped inside of my head while I was sleeping and took a snapshot of the Kong of my dreams.

But the heart of the 3 hour film and the scenes I longed for were those between Ann and Kong. It’s essentially a love story about Ann Darrow, a woman who’s been alone and struggling for practically her whole life. She is tough but soft at the same time. She is cursed believing that anything she loves she will lose. When she meets Kong and he takes her from the altar, Ann thinks she is a goner like all the native women. But there is something different about her. Kong flails her around debating on whether to eat her or kill her. But she stands up to him, entertains him.

It’s not Ann's physical beauty that he’s taken with but her heart that he somehow comes to feel and know his own heart through hers. He’s this absurdly powerful beast, King of an unknown prehistoric land where he lays waste to V-Rex's and is feared above all others. But he’s terribly lonely, having gone without companionship for years and then he meets Ann who is desperately lonely too, only in a different way. And somehow the two beings form a connection amid a beautiful scene on Skull Island when the sun is setting. It is beyond what I imagined it would be. My mind, heart, and senses were reeling along with the film...

Of course this is right about when I start thinking that I know how it’s going to end and I’m already dreading it. Peter Jackson makes you fall in Love and then just when he gets you there he breaks your heart into tiny pieces. I spent the last 20 minutes of the movie with tears streaming down my face. And before you go thinking it was just me being the Kong freak that I am -- In the row behind me sat 4 teenage boys and I swear I heard them sniffling too. Then they tried to cover up their emotions with laughter and some insensitive remarks, as boys tend to do....Of course it didn’t help matters for me that Kong had a giant Pug nose and the most soulful expressive eyes ever seen on film.

You know the rest. Kong is ripped from his mysterious homeland, taken from the indigenous people who thought he was their a God. Drugged, chained, made a mockery of. Bi Planes. An incredibly touching scene in Central Park that I won't ruin for you...and then of course the Empire State building. When it was over I was wrecked, ruined. I knew I didn’t have the heart to see that big guy destroyed. It made me leave the theatre feeling emotionally drawn. It made me want to be a filmmaker, and it made me wish I had a big hairy ape of my own.

**** 4 Stars ****