Kong: Skull Island! It’s big, it’s hairy and it’s a very interesting beast of a movie, all be it a beast that’s over a 100 feet tall and weighing about 300 tonnes. You see, it’s an interesting beast because it’s got all these really amazing parts such Loki, Captain Marvel and Nick Fury all in the same film, it has a very sweaty and humid Apocalypse Now look and feel, along with a surprisingly larger number of monster smack-downs than you’d usually expect in the film’s lean two hour run-time, however the care factor for both the characters and the beast in question seem to be lost somewhere within this enigmatic island of mystery….
So Kong: Skull Island is set in 1973 where a team of US soldiers fresh from the war with Vietnam are sent in as escorts to an island where scientists hope to uncover an abundance of gigantic pixel-based lifeforms. No sooner do they arrive on the island than they meet with said pixel giants and it becomes a battle for survival to get to the other side of the island without getting killed by, well literally anything - it seems these guys can’t seem to even sit down on a log without it coming to life.
Now even though it sounds like I’m wailing on the film, it is surprisingly fun, there is no drag time within the film and the giant monster fight sequences are all very cool. You can definitely see ever cent of the $190 million budget up there on the big screen, even if sometimes it just amounts to a bunch of pixels beating the sh*t out of each other in an environment where gravity and physics seem to be an optional extra.
The film itself opens pretty lightening quick. We get our first glimpses of Kong in the first two minutes and they don't drag their feet with his reveal once the cast reach the island. This isn't a Jaws or 2014's Godzilla with their long drawn out reveals, we just get straight to the point, especially when compared to the 2005 Peter Jackson remake. Of course in between that first and second reveal of Kong, the film works at a coke-fueled screenwriters pace to get through all the necessary character development which often means revealing character plot points and motivations with very forced and clunky expositional dialogue that's not too dissimilar to a Christopher Nolan film, although this is even clunkier than that.
The film introduces us to the usual archetypes of the army along with the traditional scientist types: we have Shea Whigham's surly but dedicated army type, a slimmed down John Goodman as the shady scientist government agent, Toby Kebbell in thankless soldier role number 1 and then Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, and Thomas Mann as thankless soldier and scientist roles number 3,4,5 and so on and so forth; and then of course we have Tian Jing, recently seen in The Great Wall, as a scientist who has a total of maybe 6 lines but helps to guarantee a Chinese release date.
But the big stars of the film are Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson who are, just kind of there, they don’t really have much to do nor do we really know anything about them other than he’s a tracker and she’s a photographer, but thankfully we have Samuel L. Jackson and John C. Reilly to pick up the slack. Once again, both these characters have very little development but at least Jackson is given a Captain Ahab style intensity whilst Reilly plays up the Dennis Hopper psychedelic-acid-trauma victim from Apocalypse Now, who provides some good humour and the only bit of heart to the film.
The visuals in this film are incredibly striking. Cinematographer Larry Fong, who lensed *cough-cough* Batman V Superman Dawn Of Justice really lets loose with some snappy fast paced visuals that gives us some real spectacle whether it be a quick bar fight featuring Hiddleston or Kong himself slam-dunking army helicopters left right and centre. The score by Henry Jackman, who gave us soundtracks for films like Kick Ass, Captain America The Winter Soldier and Big Hero 6, sounds fantastic, if not a little familiar, which is kind of the trick to a Henry Jackman score but none the less still sounds awesome. And of course director Jordan Vogt-Roberts gives us some inventive action sequences that have been somewhat inspired by James Cameron’s Aliens and John McTiernan’s Predator, although there are one or two sequences that are just laugh out loud stupid - now I’m sure they looked good as storyboards and sounded good on paper but once they are on the actual screen, you can’t help but think to yourself, “really?”
Overall, the film is fun and fast-paced with flashy visuals and incredible pixel-related death-matches aplenty, however the film does suffer from the care-factor issue where when a character dies it has no impact and when a character survives you’re neither bothered to see them alive or still in the film. It is worth seeing on the big screen for sure but go for the monkey and not the people.
Kong: Pixel Island - I mean Kong: Skull Island gets Two and a “Meh” out of Five Stars, maybe three stars if I add an extra “Meh”
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