Let’s face it: At 25 feet tall, Kong is a whole lotta gorilla.

And Peter Jackson’s three-hour “King Kong” is a whole lotta movie.

Audiences in 1933 flocked to see the original black-and-white blockbuster because they needed something fantastical to take their minds off the daily struggle of Depression-era life. And “King Kong” delivered, offering spectacular (for the day) visual effects, epic adventure and a beautiful starlet – Fay Wray – in her career-defining role.

Jackson’s film is a respectful homage to that iconic movie, with the added 2005-era whammy of limitless freedom to create landscapes, sets, buildings, vehicles – and of course, a 25-foot gorilla – within a computer and splash it onto the screen in a thrilling smorgasbord of visual design.

Jackson sets a snappy pace from the outset, introducing Naomi Watts as the aspiring actress whose luminous beauty can’t hide the world of cares she’s shouldering; Jack Black as the canny film producer whose last chance at success lies in a desperate, slightly illegal undertaking to film a jungle movie on an uncharted island; and Adrian Brody as an intellectual playwright shanghaied into joining the film crew as its on-set writer.

The story slows a bit as the crew’s tramp steamer makes its six-week journey to somewhere in the South Pacific, but when they hit Skull Island (literally) – hold on to your seat. For the next hour, this movie is a first-rate thrill ride.

The production crew of “King Kong”constructed a mostly virtual island where evolution seems to have run amok. Jackson elected not to film in the readily available rain forests of New Zealand, but to ramp up the fantasy and create a jungle where everything is greener, wetter and bigger – especially the creepy crawlies.

Kong, of course, is so realistically executed you’d swear they filmed a live gorilla on a green screen set and superimposed him. He’s all digital, though actor Andy Serkis (who provided the basis for the digital Gollum in Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and also plays the ship’s crusty cook) stood in for the gorilla in scenes with Watts and the other flesh-and-blood actors.

Once the opportunistic Black manages to subdue the mighty Kong, the film shifts back to New York and follows the mass chaos of the angry gorilla’s rampage to elude his captors and find Watts, the only other living being who has ever shown him any tenderness. Jackson works hard at keeping Kong an animal, resisting the temptation to endow him with more emotional capacity than his species naturally possesses. Still, a deliberately quiet scene of Kong playing on a frozen pond is one of the sweetest in recent movies.

The trouble with this wonderfully made film is that its iconic imagery – the savage natives offering the blonde to the great ape, Kong fighting a dinosaur, breaking his chains in the Manhattan theater and swatting biplanes atop the Empire State Building – are so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that once the story leaves the wild fantasy of Skull Island, audiences begin to check their watch, waiting for the skyscraper ascent and the ending credits.