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An eye-popping valentine to the movie that captured his childhood imagination and inspired him to become a filmmaker, Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong is by and large the balls-out spectacle that moviegoers were largely screwed out of this past summer. While far from perfect, it definitely outshines the limp, heartless final installment of Star Wars and the gritty but turgid melodrama of Batman Begins and War of the Worlds.

In releasing the movie in a post-Lord of the Rings world, Jackson is in a sense his own worst enemy. That trilogy drastically changed the playing field and created huge expectations for Jackson and others to live up to. By and large he succeeds, and Jackson’s take on the 1933 classic exhibits the same strengths and weaknesses Rings did, but he now shows more control over both.

The puffed-up run time—187 minutes, though, to be fair, it only feels like 157—is the obvious concern, and for those wondering what Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens could possibly have to add to the story to make it worth nearly doubling the length, the answer is quite a bit, mostly in the way of embellishment and elaboration rather than drastic changes.

A Depression-era opening montage introduces actress/waif Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who, literally starving for work, accepts the lead in an adventure picture being made by shady and unscrupulous movie director Carl Denham (Jack Black). She agrees partly because of her interest in the work of the movie’s writer, playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). Ann, Driscoll, Denham, and the rest of the voyagers set sail on-board the SS Venture for what they are told is a location shoot in Singapore.

The leisurely pacing during these early scenes may frustrate some moviegoers—it’s almost an hour before the ship reaches its fateful destination—but they do allow for some appreciated if clunky character development. A young sailor’s fascination with the novel Heart of Darkness feels particularly heavy-handed, but Francis Ford Coppola and three generations of high-school English teachers could just as easily be blamed for that.

Once the unsuspecting group arrives at Denham’s true destination, a deadly isle in the Lost World mold quaintly named Skull Island, the tone shifts dramatically, as Jackson begins to channel the anarchic energy and sinister atmosphere that made his early work so engaging, and—for better or worse—the subsequent hour or so becomes a parade of grisly mayhem and elaborate digital effects.

First, in scenes that feel like a National Geographic special by way of The Hills Have Eyes, the crew has a series of nasty run-ins with the island’s native inhabitants, who kidnap Ann and offer her as a sacrifice to the titular 25-foot gorilla they worship as a god. At first terrified, Ann begins to bond with the big ape after he protects her from a trio of Tyrannosaurus rexes and other menaces. Meanwhile, Driscoll and company endure a dinosaur stampede, Kong ambush, and a pit full of giant insects in their quest to rescue Ann. The latter scene is an homage to one involving giant spiders that was cut from the original Kong, allegedly because the producers found it to be excessive and extraneous, although Hollywood lore has it that test audiences were terrified by it. There’s validity to both; while it proves superfluous to the story here, it also makes for a gleefully revolting set piece.

Then there’s a bit more running and screaming before Kong is captured and taken back to New York for a brief stint as a glorified sideshow attraction followed by an appointment with destiny atop the Empire State Building, a pseudo-celebrity flame-out that easily trumps coke binging, hotel-room trashing, and Ferrari crashing.

The cast is fine, full of great character actors and spiced with excellent performances by the leads, blah blah blah—but, of course, the real star here is Kong, a wholly impressive digital creation with an astounding array of emotive abilities. It’s hard to say how much of that is the product of the computer jockeys at WETA Digital and how much of it was generated by actor Andy Serkis, whose voice and motion-capture mime work helped bring Gollum to life in Rings and repeated the process here for Kong, but the results are impressive nonetheless.

It’s also clear that Jackson’s sympathies lie almost completely with Kong, a noble beast brought down by beauty and civilization. Kong is made to suffer greatly at the hands of those who exploit as well as those—Driscoll especially—whose inaction allow for him to be exploited. It’s an old-fashioned spin on the modern woe of one’s place in what feels like a shrinking world, and Jackson goes to great pains to give it a retro, Golden Age feel. He still has a tendency to lay it on thick, but thankfully there aren’t as many doe-eyed close-ups of Watts as there were of Elijah Wood. And the T. rex fight is pretty damn cool.