KONG: SKULL ISLAND (2017) ✭✭✩✩✩

Nothing but monkey business.

I know Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) disappointed some, but I thought it was an impressive film that succeeded in one crucial aim: it made me believe in a skyscraper-sized bipedal lizard. The fact Godzilla was kept hidden from full view, for a very long time, and then mostly only seen in the dark, was an understandable gripe. I just didn’t care too much, because the creature’s presence was always felt and anticipation is often more pleasurable than audiences are willing to admit. Existing in the so-called “MonsterVerse” (groan), Legendary Pictures have now reimagined King Kong to also work as a precursor to Adam Wingard’s gestating Godzilla vs. Kong.

Both Kong and Godzilla are world-famous characters that began life in esteemed classics (1933’s King Kong and 1954’s Godzilla), but the movie industry has already plundered their cachet with sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and crossovers. So it felt like fair game when Kong: Skull Island was announced a few years ago, despite knowing it exists merely to provide two-hours worth of monster fights. And they happen mostly in broad daylight, almost from the start, as if to counter the criticism of Godzilla 2014.

It’s 1973, and government agent Bill Randa (John Goodman) hires British special forces “tracker” Captain James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) to lead an expedition to the unexplored “Skull Island” in the south Pacific. They’re escorted by the ‘Sky Devils’, a Vietnam War helicopter squadron led by Lt. Col. Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), joined by pacific photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson). But after arriving on the island through a crazy thunderstorm, the choppers come under immediate attack from an enormous angry ape, and the downed survivors find themselves spread across this mysterious island and having to fend off more oversized animals.

That’s the whole movie in a nutshell, beyond the presence of WWII pilot Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), whom they discover has been living on the island for the past 28 years with a tribe who revere Kong as a God.

Kong: Skull Island is a surprisingly boring movie, considering it delivers what most people demand from a monster movie. But in correcting some of the complaints levelled at Godzilla about its monster’s screen time, the writers drop the ball when it comes to crafting human characters and relationships you’re interested in watching whenever Kong’s not around. It’s also a little harder to make the scale of Kong feel as frightening as Godzilla managed, because he’s not interacting with our everyday world. The threat level here feels greatly reduced. The excitement of seeing people running away from enormous digital beasts dissipated years ago, as it’s now a common occurrence at the cinema, so you really have to make the characters and the situations jump off the screen to get heart pumping. But despite the efforts of its starry cast, this never truly happens.

There are a lot of famous actors involved in Skull Island, but it certainly wasn’t the script that drew them, let’s leave it at that.

These must be amongst the most tedious of films to appear in, when you consider everyone spends half their time in an uncomfortable working environment, being asked to look awed or frightened at thin air. Even worse movies to direct, one would imagine. Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) was originally offered the job, but refused it. Peter Jackson then recommended Guillermo Del Toro, but the studio instead went with little-known Jordan Vogt-Roberts. He’s made some well-received indie movies, like breakthrough The Kings of Summer (2013), so going from a $1.4 million indie to a major blockbuster costing $185 million in four years is quite something!

Vogt-Roberts certainly doesn’t embarrass himself, but it’s hard to know what we can thank Vogt-Roberts for in particular. Skull Island looks beautiful, but the sources of that is cinematographer Larry Fong and the boffins at ILM. I guess he directed in the purest sense, bringing his personal influences and vision to bear on the screenplay, while coaxing decent performances from actors given sketchy archetypes to play. Only Samuel L. Jackson and John C. Reilly really leave any kind of mark in the acting stakes.

The failing of Kong: Skull Island, in stark contrast to Godzilla, is that it has very little on its mind beyond delivering various monster fights. The “beauty and the beast” undertow of the original King Kong gave that film an emotional pull, and the relationship between Kong and the women he tends to fall in love with have always been part of the best movies.

I’ll always enjoy Jackson’s unfairly derided ’05 remake because he understood that part of the story was vital, and had the wonderful Naomi Watts to sell the weirdness. Here, Brie Larson has a few random moments of “connection” with Kong, kind of, but it doesn’t develop into anything important. It feels added into the story more as a nod to the previous Kong adventures, completely missing the point.

And this version of Kong’s just not very interesting. He’s merely a simian version of Godzilla; a giant monster keeping other monsters in check, which is how he’s eventually perceived as a “hero” by those who initially feared him. Kong’s a lonely deity, stuck in perpetual battle with giant squid and lizards, whose own family were slain by a fearsome adversary, but there isn’t much magic to any of that.

How on earth will Godzilla vs. Kong work based on this, seeing as it’ll involve two monsters whose “job” is killing their own kind to protect the planet? Whose side are we supposed to be on? I can see it going very Batman v. Superman, perhaps with Kong and Godzilla eventually realising both their mothers were called Mothra?

Cast & Crew

director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts.
writers: Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein & Derek Connolly (story by John Gatins, based on ‘King Kong’ by Merian C. Cooper & Edgar Wallace).
starring: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell, John Ortiz, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann, Terry Notary & John C. Reilly.