Behold the Gates Of Kong! And what impressive structures they are - massive wooden doors reinforced with bamboo spears and flanked by formidable moss-covered stone ramparts that would seem to pre-date the Incas and Aztecs. Of course, the stone's actually polystyrene, the moss is dyed yak hair and the doors are the products of a local lumberyard. But in the hands of Peter Jackson and his wily allies at Weta, the fake has a funny way of looking hyperreal.

It's not just the gates and the dividing wall that impress. While the native village in the 1933 version of King Kong made do with mud huts, here Skull Island's tribesmen inhabit an ancient city devastated by earthquake activity. Littered with shattered temples and statues of snake-bearing deities, it's what you imagine 16th-century Mexico looked like after the Conquistadors went to town. And if the fish drying by the fireside looks and smells real, that's because it was purchased at the Wellington fish market that very morning.

When Orson Welles first looked over Citizen Kane's striking set, he described it as the biggest train set a boy ever had. On Kong, the not-so-fat controller is Peter Jackson, who's now so svelte he looks just as lost amongst the ruins of the ravaged city as anyone else. As he looks at the disintegrating structures around him, it's clear that Jackson - a Kong freak since first seeing Ernest Schoedsack's and Merian Cooper's masterpiece aged eight - is having the time of his life.

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