Kong: Skull Island review on 123films

Kong: Skull Island review on 123films

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All monster films fall into one of two categories: the kind that takes its time revealing the monster, and the kind that shows you the monster right away and never leaves it for long. Think “Jaws” (fins and scary music for the first hour) as opposed to “Deep Blue Sea” or “Sharknado” (Shark-o-Rama pretty much throughout). Most versions of the King Kong story have fallen into the first category: the 1933 original, the 1976 remake, and Peter Jackson’s three-hour 2005 version unveiled the big ape gradually. “Kong: Skull Island,” on the other hand, introduces Kong after less than half an hour, then keeps him (and lots of other big, scary creatures) front and center throughout the film’s 118-minute running time. There’s even a moment where another character tells a story about Kong battling creatures and the movie cuts to images of Kong battling the creatures, in case you weren’t getting your fill of monster-on-monster action.

I’m not mentioning the difference in approach to condemn the new Kong: quite the contrary. This one—about a team of soldiers and scientists that gets stranded on Skull Island during a mission to map the island’s geological interior with explosive charges, which you absolutely should not do when visiting a place called Skull Island—is a half-magnificent, half-misguided example of a “show me the monster” movie. At its best it reminded me of “The Mysterious Island” and “The Land that Time Forgot,” films that were little more than collections of monster-driven action scenes hitched to a perfunctory story about explorers wandering a jungle, doing stuff they were warned not to do, and getting eaten.

The cast includes a couple dozen people who are basically monster chow and therefore not worth describing here; a World War II airman who’s been trapped on the island for 28 years (woolly-bearded John C. Reilly, who steals the film instantly and never gives it back); a tough, quiet British SAS officer (Tom Hiddleston) who has amazing hair; a Special Forces colonel (Samuel L. Jackson) who develops an Ahab-like obsession with killing Kong; a war photographer (Brie Larson) who looks like a Breck girl and has no meaningful plot function; and a wild-eyed visionary (John Goodman) who believes the earth is hollow and filled with beasts whose existence predates the dinosaurs.

The latter theory was also advanced in Gareth Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla,” a slow-reveal monster film. As you may have heard, this new Kong inhabits the same universe as Edwards’ “Godzilla” and represents stage two in Warner Bros’ scheme to Marvel-ize the giant monster picture by releasing an interconnected series of films that will build to King Kong fighting Godzilla. Annoyed as I am by the studios’ obsession with “expanded universe” storytelling, it seems tailor-made for films with apes and lizards the size of skyscrapers. I say this with the authority of a man who probably spent months of his childhood making animal and dinosaur figurines fight each other in a sandbox, so don’t even try arguing with me, there’s no point.

The monsters are brilliantly designed and skillfully animated (except for a few shots where Kong looks a tad cartoony), and the army of visual and sound effects artists convince you that that these CGI titans live and breathe and weigh hundreds of tons. The title character tears into his foes with the ferocity of an MMA fighter, even using crude weapons when fists and teeth aren’t enough. His opponents include a giant octopus, a fleet of Huey gunships, and creatures that look like wingless pterodactyls with skull-beak heads. Whenever the action flags, the film stirs more creatures into the humans’ meandering trip across the island, including regular-sized pterodactyls, giant insects, and a battleship-sized water buffalo that might’ve been drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. (Alas, the giant ants described by Reilly’s character never materialize.)

Thing is, though, “Kong: Skull Island” seems uncomfortable with being pure childish fun. And the basic theme articulated in both this movie and Evans’ “Godzilla”—Mother Earth doesn’t belong to us, and She can shake us off like a bad case of fleas if we get too uppity—isn’t enough for the filmmakers, either. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts (“The Kings of Summer”) with a script credited to three writers, the film is set in 1973 during the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. At first this seems like a handy way of explaining why the world doesn’t already know about Skull Island (global surveillance satellites were a new thing back in ‘73) while fetishizing mid-century analog technology a la Wes Anderson (there are loving close-ups of 35mm movie and still cameras, vinyl record players, rotary phones, and mainframe computers with magnetic tape spools).

Soon enough, though, you realize that “Kong: Skull Island” wants to make other kinds of statements, though about what it’s not sure. It’s encrusted with layers of pop culture homage and political allegory that keep threatening to add up to something but never do. Vogt-Roberts is on record calling this film a parable of the United States military getting swallowed by the jungles of Vietnam, just in case you didn’t notice all the homages to classic Vietnam movies, particularly Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” and Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (the IMAX poster for “Kong: Skull Island” is even modeled on Bob Peak’s 1979 poster for Coppola’s film). When Vogt-Roberts isn’t blatantly raiding the most famous ‘Nam movie soundtracks (Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle” and The Chambers Brothers’ “The Time Has Come Today” all get a workout) he stirs in undigested chunks of Coppola’s “Apocalypse” inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” naming one character Marlow (after the book’s principal narrator) and another, ahem, Conrad. (As a friend put it, “I love the smell of ape palm in the morning.”)