Naomi Watts and King Kong

New York, Dec. 11 (Reuters): A new version of King Kong, the greatest Beauty and the Beast movie ever made, is about to frighten and inspire audiences ? this time with modern special effects, a more realistic gorilla and more loving glances between ape and girl than ever before.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson shifts his attention from the tiny Oscar-winning hobbits of Middle Earth, to a $200-million remake of the 1933 classic about the giant ape and his love for a blonde who fits in the palm of his hand. The movie opens on Wednesday and is already generating Oscar buzz in Hollywood with some experts even predicting that it could challenge Titanic for the biggest-grossing film of all time.

Jackson has left the storyline set in the 1930s but updated it with the kind of 21st century computer film technology that he showed off in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

He has also made Kong look and behave like an authentic gorilla, except for size, and he based Kong’s attraction with the character Ann Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) on a real gorilla’s need for companionship, not on the fondling and ogling of the original and its 1976 remake.

“He is the ultimate man,” Watts said, referring to the soul and the power of Kong.

The result is a three-hour, white-knuckle ride that Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric, hopes will thrill audiences and position Jackson as the most bankable director of blockbusters since Steven Spielberg.

Jackson, 44, has wanted to remake Kong ever since he was 9 years old and saw the original on television in his native New Zealand.

“It had such a profound affect on me that it made me want to make films. The next day I got my parents’ Super 8 movie camera and started to do stop-motion animation with a clay dinosaur,” Jackson said of recreating the scene in which Kong fights a tyrannosaurus. “I really wanted to see it done with the technology that we have now.”

The original Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, stunned audiences with special effects that may appear crude today but were revolutionary for the their time.

Jackson's version also scraps the ape’s apparent sexual attraction to Ann as shown in the earlier versions, thus creating a more compelling and believable relationship.