In 1933, during the Great Depression, in New York City, an aspiring, down-on-her-luck actress named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is hired by the nearly broke filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) to star in a movie. On board the S.S. Venture sailing to a mysterious island, she becomes involved with screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). The ship becomes lost in the fog and runs aground on Skull Island. Carl and his film crew explore the island but are attacked by the natives. Ann is kidnapped to be offered as a sacrifice to their god King Kong (Andy Serkis in motion-capture). Carl is obsessed with filming Kong and everyone else is determined to rescue Ann.
Ann wins over Kong with juggling and dancing and begins to understand him. The rescue party pushes through a jungle filled with dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures. Many are killed in a dinosaur stampede. Others fall into a pit and are devoured by giant insects. Carl loses his camera. Kong rescues Ann from Tyrannosaurs. Jack succeeds in snatching Ann away from Kong and he follows her back to the landing, where Carl knocks him out with chloroform.
In New York City, the creature is displayed to a posh Broadway audience as Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World. It breaks free of its chains and wrecks the theater, then wrecks quite a bit of New York searching for Ann. The U.S. Army attacks and it climbs to the top of the new Empire State Building, holding Ann in his hand. It fights off attacking warplanes but is wounded and falls to its death, as Jack rescues Ann.
This is exactly the same plot of the original 1933 King Kong, lovingly filmed and expanded to three hours of grand drama and high-tech special effects by director Peter Jackson, written by him and by Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. He was offered the remake in 1995, but other giant monster films were planned and Jackson was busy with the Lord of the Rings series. They were so successful that Universal Pictures came back to Jackson in 2004 and offered him basically anything he wanted. The film received high praise, was hugely successful, and won three technical Oscars. There were complaints, of course, by those fiercely loyal to the original. The film cost 207 million to make and it made 562 million in the theaters, plus 100 million in DVD sales the first six days, and later they sold the TV rights for another 26 million.
Andy Serkis played Kong brilliantly in motion capture, and also Lumpy, the ship’s cook, who is devoured by slugs. Director Jackson and makeup artist Rick Baker played the pilot and gunner of the plane that killed Kong. Fay Wray was supposed to appear in a cameo, speaking the words, “It wasn’t the planes, it was Beauty killed the Beast,” but she died at the age of 96. Peter Jackson wept for Kong’s death when he saw the original at the age of nine, tried to remake it at the age of eleven, and became a film director largely because of it. He took the job, despite being exhausted from Lord of the Rings, because he could not stand to see it done by anyone else.
Most of his crew from the Tolkien movies worked on this one as well. He spent a great deal of time and money creating the scene censored from the original, of the sailors falling to their deaths in a ravine full of monsters. Carl Denham was based on Orson Wells. It took 18 months to build the CGI version of the Empire State Building, and it had only taken 14 to build the original. King Kong’s roar is a lion’s roar played backwards at half speed. Andy Serkis studied gorillas in Rwanda and became friends with one at a British zoo. 370 hours of film was shot, cut down to a 188-minute playing time. Some of the props in the remake came from the original, out of Jackson’s own memorabilia collection. The camera Denham carries is an accurate copy of the original Bell and Howell 2709 used to film the original, though made out of foam to be easily carried.