Yesterday, I wandered off for a morning show on opening day, as has been my wont of late. The beauty of not having a job is thusly demonstrated, though I miss midnight shows a bit. Haven’t done anything event-like since Serenity. (Which, to my amusement, I’m going to see right now, so I’ll continue the actual review after I get back. Yay, dollar theater.) But, anyway. Opening day for King Kong, which is to say, Peter Jackson’s latest attempt to show the world that a horror movie director can in fact be a world-class director in the general sense.

There’s a lot going on here. First of all, it’s a remake. There’s always, then, an urge to compare the remake to the original. Usually, this comes out very, very poorly for the remake. Not here though. Of course the technology is so many orders of magnitude improved that it’s hardly worth discussing. Except for a couple of CGI people, there was nothing that did not look real. Kong and the other denizens of Skull Island looked real 100% of the time. In fact, Kong looked real enough that I feel comfortable claiming he could act better than most people in the kinds of movies I generally watch. The moment when you could not read his thoughts on his face was a rare one indeed.

And, okay, three hours seems like a lot (though for my money, the movie was never truly slow). But where the movie shines is that the story is intact, yet still improved. It takes a special eye to take a classic tragedy and make changes that are improvements instead of disasters. Jackson has already shown he has that eye, but now he’s shown that it wasn’t a fluke. Simply put (and please believe me when I say I’m trying very hard not to gush here), this is the best movie I’ve seen in years. It’s easily in my top five, and if I were being fair to the movie instead of my sense of nostalgia, I expect it would be top two or better.

I’m going to say something here, and it’s not going to make any sense, but it might if you let it percolate for a moment. King Kong is easily the best serious drama (i.e., not a movie with fantastic elements) I’ve ever seen. Now, okay, does it compare to The Godfather, say? I’m not trying to answer that, because deep down, apparently romances are more to my taste than mafia flicks, so it’s an unfair comparison. But the thing is, every note was right. It’s a tragedy because everyone is a good guy. Okay, Jack Black’s character has a few moments of not-so-good, but he’s far more sympathetic than he should be by rights, and he’s the only one who crosses any kind of line. So you’ve got all these characters doing the right thing as they see it, and the outcome is inevitable, and completely heartbreaking.

Maybe what this all says about me is that I’m a sucker for a simple, well-told story. Which I’m willing to admit to, though the complex ones certainly have their place. But if you have any of that in you, I dare you to find a movie you liked better this year. (And make no mistake, I adored Serenity, and I really liked Revenge of the Sith, out of more than obligation. So it was already a pretty big movie year for me, and I would not have expected to be hearing me say this, a couple of days ago.)