"No one cry when Jaws die. But when the monkey* die, people gonna cry."

—Dino De Laurentiis

When a talented director becomes successful enough to realize a large-scale pet project—a Hook, a Gangs of New York, an On Deadly Ground—it's usually a cue for the expectant viewer to tamp down the enthusiasm. Often these movies show signs of having been locked up in the filmmaker's head for too long, and every frame feels fussed over, overly rehearsed, and ultimately, too weighted down to be much fun.

Peter Jackson has, by all accounts, been waiting to make a version of King Kong his entire conscious life, only embarking on the Lord of the Rings trilogy after studios passed on his initial pitch for remaking the 1933 classic. (The suits may have had a point, actually: Jackson and partner Fran Walsh's first draft, available on the internet after a bit of creative Googling, reads like the blueprint for a fun, yet decidedly schlocky B-picture.) After basking in the Frodo bucks, the director has returned to the project, delivering a $200 million-plus, 3-hours-and-change revamp of a film that was pretty close to perfect already. Does it play? Like freakin' gangbusters. Okay, there are some reasonable quibbles: The first act is more leisurely than it needs to be; cast in a major role, Jack Black can't entirely abandon his trademark deranged-cherub vamping; the editorial decision to insert slow-mo skip frames in the middle of full-tilt kinetic set pieces is annoying. But in the long run, do these things matter? Nope. Not to go nuts with the hyperbole, but this King Kong should remind burned-out viewers why they started loving movies in the first place.

From the first frames of NYC in the throes of the Great Depression, King Kong avoids the filmed-by-committee feel of most ludicrously expensive blockbusters. Jackson, working with his usual New Zealand–based crew and effects teams, gives even the biggest scenes a handmade, geekily obsessive feel. Assisted by knowingly overstylized lead performances by Black, Naomi Watts, and Adrian Brody, the filmmakers cherry-pick the best of today's technology and techniques in order to emulate the wide-eyed wonder from yesteryear. And then there's the gorilla. As rendered by Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings' Gollum), Kong is an astonishing creation, by turns scary, lovable, and always fully realized. Corny as it sounds, you forget that you're watching a special effect, long before the tragic events at the Empire State Building. (I admit it. I teared up.)

As genuinely touching as the final New York scenes are, though, the true heart of the film probably lies in the insanely sustained second act, in which Kong, his gal, and her supposed rescuers come into contact with an army of dinosaurs, angry villagers, and seemingly every creepy thing ever to walk the earth. Oscars aside, the director clearly hasn't lost touch with his splatter roots, as evidenced by the sequence in which the few surviving crew members must fend off a cave full of bugs, crabs, and other critters. (Serkis, in a cameo as the ship's cook, is gifted with a magnificently gross demise, the kind of thing that gets you giggling at your own nausea.) By all rights, this one-peak-after-another pace should be exhausting, in the way that Spielberg's relentless flow of invention in the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ultimately had viewers reaching for the Advil. Yet the damned thing just keeps outdoing itself. Throughout, Jackson manages to simultaneously convey the sense of a filmmaker at the absolute top of his technical game, and a kid deliriously hopped up on Poprocks, going nuts with his favorite action figures. His dream project, which will probably already have made a gazillion dollars by the time you read this, comes off as one of the purest examples of sheer cinematic love to ever hit the screen. Man, this is what movies do.

* Ed. note: Mr. De Laurentiis was not fully fluent in the English language, and therefore could not be expected to know the difference between monkeys and apes.