He's huge, hairy and a king among monsters. But make no mistake, the gorilla in Peter Jackson's "King Kong" is not your grandfather's giant ape.

The 1933 "King Kong" and Jackson's brand-new version have much in common, of course. Both monsters hail from a mysterious, fog-enshrouded island, both wind up at the top of the Empire State Building after a brief flirtation with show business, and they both have a fixation with a glamorous actress named Ann Darrow, who travels quite neatly in their gargantuan mitts.

But this three-hour "Kong," which opens Wednesday and will surely crush all box-office opposition, offers a monkey for the new millennium - a nearly paternal gorilla who connects with Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) in a more subtle and personal way than did his 1933 and 1976 forebears.

"It's a more romantic picture," says Adrien Brody, who stars as Jack Driscoll, Kong's rival for Ann's attention. "And I'm happy it is, 'cause I think it brings a good element that was lacking in the original, and not just for my character - there's a greater level of romance with the character of Kong himself."

In fact, thanks to the evolution of special effects in the last 70 years, the new Kong has a realism and a range of emotions that allow him to be every bit as complex as any human on the screen.

While both movies are set during the bleakest years of the Great Depression, the new one looks back at the era with an understanding that was not possible at the time.

"There was a huge difference in the culture," Brody says. "One thing you see in the original is that there's a more blatant disregard for Kong, as a beast. 'King Kong' was always a tragic story, but it was a lot more cut-and-dried back in the early '30s."

The 1933 film was the most ambitious combination of live action and special effects to have hit the screen up to that point. No child of the Depression ever forgot the thrill of seeing master animator Willis O'Brien's amazing models, the many dinosaurs and Kong himself unleashing their savage fury.

"I was about 13 or 14 when I first saw 'King Kong,' when it opened at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. The movie changed my life," says Ray Harryhausen, who took O'Brien's technology and used it to fashion his own brilliant career as a filmmaker and animator with movies like "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" (1958) and "Jason and the Argonauts" (1963).

"I've always associated Willis' work with the old alchemists, who tried to create the perfect homunculus through occult means and chemicals. RKO Pictures and O'Brien succeeded, using stop-motion animation instead of magic," Harryhausen says.

Jackson, who directed the groundbreaking "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, felt the same way when he first saw "King Kong" as a child at home in New Zealand.

"I watched the original on television when I was 9, and it had such a profound effect on me that it made me want to start making films," says Jackson, who turned 44 in October. "The next day I got my parents' super-8 camera and tried to make a stop-motion animation film with a clay brontosaurus."

Jackson was adamant that his "King Kong" be set, like the original, in the '30s, unlike the 1976 remake, which had a contemporary setting. Most audiences agreed that the fantasy didn't work as a modern story.

"I prefer to look at the original 1933 film in the context of the Depression, when the whole social contract seemed to be crashing and economic backsliding got confused with evolutionary backsliding, at least in Hollywood monster films," says David J. Skal, author of "The Monster Show."

"Just as the shape-shifting Count Dracula blurred the distinctions between humans and lower animals, just as Frankenstein's monster was a strange composite of a robot and an ape, and just as Dr.Jekyll's alter ego, Mr. Hyde, was an outright Neanderthal man, King Kong was the ultimate embodiment of the human merged with the subhuman," Skal adds.

Much of Kong's behavior in the new film comes from research done by Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, who wrote the script with Jackson, and actor Andy Serkis, who provides the human model for Kong (as he did for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings"). To get the right feel for the part, Serkis spent time with a gorilla clan in Rwanda and was "adopted" by a female ape named Zaire at London Zoo.

"She chose me and she was very possessive of me, and if I played with any of the other gorillas, she'd get very upset," Serkis says. "And when my wife came to visit, she got quite jealous and threw a water bottle at her."

The 1933 film certainly hinted at a sexual fascination between Kong and Ann, but this has been replaced by a deeper relationship in the new movie.

"Kong got away with behavior that would never have been tolerated in a human Hollywood performance," Skal says. "Even the most extreme pre-Code films didn't feature leading men tickling captive women while peeling off their clothes - much less sniffing them."

"[The sexuality] is an interesting aspect of the first film, but as a King Kong fan, it's not really what I'm interested in," Jackson says. "I'm interested in the big gorilla and the lost island and the dinosaurs and the emotional connection between Ann and Kong."

In the new film, Driscoll is a successful New York City playwright, a "tweedy type with his nose in a book and his head up his ass," as Ann describes him. The 1933 Driscoll, played by Bruce Cabot, was a typical Hollywood he-man.

"We thought it'd be more interesting if Driscoll is as much out of his element in Kong's jungle as Kong is later in New York City," Boyens says. "We also felt that as soon as you have an alpha-male heroic character - the old lunkhead action guy - going up against the biggest alpha male in the world, King Kong, it becomes about them and stops being about Ann. And then, of course, Peter, Fran [Jackson's wife] and I are all writers, so it was maybe a bit self-referential as well.

"Most importantly, what it's about is how Ann's made this connection with this animal who has this incredible masculine energy, and whose truthfulness and simplicity are contrasted with Driscoll, whom she loves - but who can't yet tell her he loves her.

"By the time we reach the end of the picture, Driscoll goes up to the top of the Empire State Building to save himself, not to save her, because he's already done that once, on the island," Boyens continues. "We wanted him to go up there because it hits him, smack dab in the face, that he's gonna lose her and that he needs to step up emotionally."

"What we realized is that for Kong the definition of beauty is not about blond hair, it's about emotion," Boyens says. "One of the films we watched was the Charles Laughton version of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' [1939]. It occurred to us that Kong and Quasimodo have much in common.

"Quasimodo doesn't fall in love with Esmeralda because she's beautiful, but because she's the one who brings him water. It's an emotional connection. The same is true for Kong and Ann. Just as Quasimodo takes Esmeralda to his sanctuary - the church - Kong takes Ann to the one place he knows that rises above the chaos and the darkness below. In fact, he does it twice - first, he takes her to his lair on the island, then to the top of the Empire State Building."

"The 'Beauty and the Beast' story is about the redemptive power of love for the Beast, who is a loner in his castle. He has all this power but no human connection, no family," says Marina Warner, author of "From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers."

"Like Kong, the classic idea of the Beast is one who tends to have very pure, strong emotions - he doesn't contain or repress his feelings. I think that for women, who wrote the original myth in the 17th and 18th centuries, the story had a primitive natural eroticism, a combination of raw power and innocence. A woman's dream of a protective monster like Kong is a sort of infantilizing dream of being back with some daddy figure, of thinking yourself back to the beginnings of your own life, when your parents were huge and your father was a titan."

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