Film Review - Kong: Skull Island (12)

Is that a monkey?

(I'm about to watch Kong: Skull Island. As someone who loves both the original King Kong and Peter Jackson's 2005 remake/homage, I have reservations about the wisdom of having made this one. Do we need more Kong? Convince me...)

And that was a lot more fun than I'd expected.

Kong, like any other cinema fantasy icon, gets perpetually reinvented. Some of it is genuinely creative, some of it B-movie pap. In the 1960s the giant ape was pitted against mega-lizard Godzilla, in an epic (and very rubbery) monster mash-up. Well that's the route we're taking here, with the movie firmly based within the same storytelling universe as 2014's Godzilla.

Kong: Skull Island is a mash-up of another kind too. Yes it's got the great ape and accompanying prehistoric menagerie of deadly creatures, but by setting itself in 1973 and providing a military element, it's also a Vietnam War movie with overtones of Apocalypse Now. Plus when one character develops a personal vendetta against Kong, it's Captain Ahab versus Moby Dick. But brush aside allusions to classic cinema and literature - this is pulp entertainment through and through.

The story is what you'd expect - a scientific team (headed up by John Goodman) gain funding for an expedition to the mysterious Skull Island. They're accompanied by Samuel L Jackson's army lieutenant and lots of expendable soldiers (who fly in on helicopters that look like so many swattable hornets to an eighty-foot gorilla). Also along for the bumpy ride are Tom Hiddleston's animal tracker and Room's Bree Larson as a self-declared 'anti-war' photographer. It all goes very wrong very fast, with our band of potential victims split up and at the mercy of the location's manifold horrors. 

Let's do the minuses first. The film introduces a lot of characters and doesn't develop many of them beyond monster fodder. Kong and his destructive power are introduced early, with few human performances having proper room to breathe (in any sense). Jackson puts his usual stamp on proceedings and John C Reilly shows up halfway through to act as an entertaining Ben Gunn-style island guide. Hiddleston and Larson, our leading twosome however, never get far beyond stock hero and heroine.  

The script isn't poetry either. Any modern movie deserves sharpness in its writing, rather than a script that never gets beyond 'serviceable'. (Take a leaf out of the Marvel playbook, guys. Apply a bit of A-grade polish to your B-movie plot!)

All that said, the film really succeeds elsewhere. There's a pacy quality to it all, established in a kinetic opening sequence and maintained throughout. Skull Island is a character in itself, its many landscapes created in exquisite detail. Standard Kong features like the ape graveyard and indigenous Skull Island community are recreated with imagination and in the latter case nicely subverted from the rabid savages you might expect. 

But it's the monster-heavy action sequences that really reward your ticket price. Kong demonstrates his kingly credentials in the film's final set-pieces, while the myriad other creatures prove satisfyingly unpleasant. In an era of sometimes slapdash CGI, the human-versus-beastie-versus-even-nastier-beastie interludes are photo-realistic, stunningly complex and cheer-inducing in their execution. If it doesn't have the emotional heft of the Jackson remake, it's bravura stuff nonetheless.

So, why make this movie in the first place? Oh yes - fun. And on that front it most definitely delivers. Count me satisfied.