YOU WOULD have to be living in some Skull Island cranny not to know that a King Kong movie has just been released. The publicity machine has been pounding its chest for months. We have heard the loud drumming from across the Atlantic. We have watched the thick foliage of Hollywood stir. And now, the great beast is at long last emerging. Trailing a clutter of paltry promotions, Peter Jackson’s consummate remake comes crashing into view.

Of course I scuttled along to see it — but not as a critic. I was not interested in comparing this film with its forebears (though it is as much a movie about movie-making as anything else). I was not interested in its virtuoso display of special effects (though I have survived a stampede of Brontosauri through an unfeasibly narrow ravine). Nor did I go to admire the dramatic talents of Andy Serkis, who plays King Kong (though his simian sensitivities are pretty amazing). All I wanted of this film was for it to move me as it moved me when I saw it as a child.

All right, I may not be quite as obsessive as Jackson. After first seeing the 1933 version, apparently, he devoted his spare time to constructing Plasticine Kong models which he coated with clippings from his mother’s fur stole. His $207 million spectacular is the logical outcome of a long-nurtured passion. But still, I can remember how deeply this movie thrilled me. It touched straight to the core. I can remember the panic, the reverence, the heart-thumping exultation, the sadness, the outrage and the tears that streamed down my cheeks. I can remember the guilt.

King Kong has a visceral power because it speaks with the voice of a myth: with the bellow of the Minotaur as he lumbers through his labyrinth; with the arrogance of Theseus as he trusts to his thread; with the sorrow of Ariadne left abandoned on an alien island. This is a movie that reverberates with a deep symbolic resonance. It speaks of the inner life of mankind: explores the emotional jungles that explanation alone cannot navigate. Myths like this help us to feel our way back into the world.

This film speaks directly to a mankind more than ever numb to nature. This Kong — not a monster but a magnificent silverback gorilla — speaks of the ravages that we wreak upon the splendours of the planet, of the greed that lays waste to natural glory. This is a movie that explains why in a world of almost six billion people there are barely 600 gorillas left; why in a Montreal conference dedicated to environmental matters, the chief American negotiator upped sticks and walked out.

I remember reading Dian Fossey’s book Gorillas in the Mist. She described how an orphaned youngster that she rescued from captors wept when it was first shown its native jungles again. It didn’t surprise me that these creatures should be capable of such emotion. But, after seeing the movie, I was relieved to find out that homo sapiens can still cry for Kong too.

• ONE OF the ideas that Jackson’s multi-faceted film plays about with is that of the exploitation picture: movies in which, in order to sneak titillating productions past the censors, directors nobly denounced the social evils of their ever more salacious subject matter. Last week Christie’s auctioned a wonderfully lurid collection of posters for these films. Society as we knew it was evidently under great threat. Polygamy, nudism, prostitution, even teenagers, all presented urgent dangers. “Wake Up America. Must youth be burned at Satan’s altar?” a poster cautions.

  Cannabis, at the very least, could make a girl flash her garters. At worst it would lead her to “kill or maim without reason”.

  The family unit was crumbling. “Is there Sex After Marriage? Don’t ask the wife, ask Julie” suggests one crusading director. “Girl with an Itch. Have negligee, will travel,” threatens another.

  Thank heavens we were warned — and not least about that once widespread menace of gorillas having sex with white women. It seems to have flourished with a particular urgency in the 1930s when King Kong was first released.

• A JOKE for Kong fans. A zookeeper comes across a gorilla reading the Bible and Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

  “Why have you chosen those two books?” he asks.

  The gorilla replies: “I just wanted to know if I was my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”

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