The review of "King Kong" that appeared in the March 7, 1933, edition of Daily Variety called the fantasy-adventure a goofy yarn "about a 50-foot ape who goes for a five-foot blonde."

That pretty much describes Peter Jackson's remake, though Naomi Watts — who takes over for 5-foot-3 Fay Wray as Depression-era actress and ape bait Ann Darrow — stands 5-foot-5.

But where 1933 moviegoers were warned by Variety's critic that they would have to forgive the film's "machine-like movements" and "phony atmosphere," you are advised to buckle your seat belt.

Jackson's Kong — the giant ape, his athletic movements and his lush Skull Island habitat — are as authentic as a heart attack, which is the risk you take in joining him. Watts, thankfully, does not scream as loudly or as often as Wray, but audience members are likely to fill the void.

What a movie!

This is how the medium seduced us originally, and this is what it's going to take if it's to fend off its high-tech 21st-century competition.

And a New Zealander is leading the way.

Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy captivated audiences worldwide, and "Kong" — using the same combination of live action, performance-capture and computer animation — keeps the adrenaline flowing.

The $200 million-plus spectacle is funny when it wants to be, exhilarating when it needs to be and a sentimental triumph at the end.

Its emotional power is enabled by the convincing illusion of the ape himself. The face of the 1933 Kong was a static Halloween fright mask. The new one, computer-animated over a live performance by Andy Serkis (who served the same function for Gollum in "Rings"), is that of a living, breathing, thinking, sympathetic — and love-struck — creature.

Kong comes with a history of violence, recorded in the scars that cover his body. As king of the time-warped and brutal Skull Island jungle, Kong has had to fight to earn his iconic status among the island's people, who have a built a massive wall between him and them, and who attempt to appease him with periodic offerings of sacrificial virgins.

It is on one of his pick-up runs to the sacrificial altar that Kong is brought up short by the sight of a writhing white blond. It's Ann Darrow, the fledgling co-star of a wildlife drama being filmed by legendary showman Carl Denham (Jack Black) and recently be-squeezed girlfriend of screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody).

For the next hour and 20 minutes of film time, Kong will fend off monsters and trigger-happy humans to keep his prize safe and in his possession. And she — unlike Wray's Darrow — will learn to appreciate having the big guy around when dinosaurs are snapping at her toes.

The sexual tension between Kong and Ann was actually stronger in the '33 version. There's nothing in the new one as bestially unseemly as Kong stripping away Ann's clothing and sniffing the shreds. (Or of him fondling her breasts, as he did to Jessica Lange in the best-forgotten 1976 version.)

But Kong's love is not unrequited, either. Jackson, who wrote the script with his "Rings" collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, has opted for a more traditional beauty-and-the-beast love story, altering Ann's point of view from terrorized lamb to earth mother.

The bond that's formed between her and the ape in the jungle pays off big-time in the climactic scenes in New York, where, after Kong's disastrous Broadway debut as the Eighth Wonder of the World, he takes her and climbs the Empire State Building looking for the safety he had found with her on Skull Island.

It is the corniest, craziest — and possibly most heartbreaking — screen moment of the year.

As spectacular as Kong and the jungle scenes are, the film's greatest physical wonder may be its re-creation of Depression-era Manhattan. Showing Times Square in period dress and in full color, with hundreds of cars on the streets, seems an impossible feat. And the aerial images above the Empire State Building, against the city's earlier, shorter skyline, are breathtaking.

There are minor flaws to note. Though Watts finds a perfect blend of credulity and passion, Brody is completely miscast as Jack Driscoll, and Black's offbeat comic moves are too contemporary for the period. Also, some of the action sequences — and the expanded ensemble of monsters — overreach. But this is, don't forget, a goofy yarn about a super-size ape who falls for a blond — which is to say, anything goes, and everything is movie magic.