Screen Anarchists On KONG: SKULL ISLAND

Kwenton Bellette, Contributing Writer

In hindsight, particularly when compared to Peter Jackson's iteration of the screen legend, Kong: Skull Island remains a heartless attempt that fails to capture the movie magic and classical Hollywood alchemy that made its human characters so vital to the mythic monster narrative. This would be less of an issue if the half-baked premise of post Vietnam War felt anything but artificial.

Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Associate Editor

I saw Kong: Skull Island in Imax 3D, with four young and very enthusiastic boys and their parents. Combined with low expectations, this was probably the best scenario under which to see the film. I don't particularly gravitate to monster films, though I like ones with a good story (Grabbers comes to mind as a recent monster film I loved). But I got into this one. Granted, it is nothing extraordinary; it's amusing, but rarely laugh-out-loud funny (John C. Reilly did make me chuckle a little). It's got some great effects; but for that budget, it's a given. The setting of the story, the end of the Vietnam War, seems a little odd considering most of its target audience will likely have no idea of the significance of that era for the story or what any possible subtext might be (protection from greater evil? The truly evil monsters that lurk below? The foot soldiers of a great evil, almost as bad as their master)? And granted, by the end, I was getting bored and waiting for the inevitable conclusion. But this is a pretty decent matinee monster movie, a throwback to ones of the 30s and 40s, Universal studio-era films, with a dashing hero (Tom Hiddleston doing some great Errol Flynn-style performing), a beautiful and smart heroine (Brie Larson, cashing in on her Oscar, good for her), a fun yet campy human villain (Samuel L. Jackson), and the comic relief (Reilly). I don't think Kong: Skull Island is trying to be anything but an unabashed thrill ride with some great monster fights. I wouldn't rave about it, but if those boys I was with have anything to say, we're going to be seeing a lot more of these films.

Ard Vijn, Associate Editor, Features

The concept of Kong: Skull Island seemed potentially cool to me, and the first trailer did make me sit up and take notice. The second trailer didn't inspire much hope in me though, and with dismay I read Kwenton's review, which seemed to corroborate my worst fears.
Thing is, I already had tickets to go see it with friends, last weekend, in IMAX 3D. So see it I did, and... maybe it was because of lowered expectations? I had an absolute blast with the film.

I've always been a fan of monster films which had monsters in it just for monsters' sake. I adored the Ray Harryhausen-powered adventures of Sinbad, but the wait was always for the creatures to appear. And... well, Kong: Skull Island fully delivers, with a nice selection of creepies, crawlies and other beasties. Some are obvious, some less so, but all are inspired. A giant sweet-water mire squid? A humungous granddaddy long-legs with pincers? Hell, why not!

So yeah, I was much amused. Oh sure, there is plenty to criticize here. Characterisation is OK-ish but superficial, bordering on caricature. The Vietnam-movie references (ranging from Apocalypse Now all the way to... eh... Apocalypse Now) get very tiresome, and are not helped by the most unimaginative choice of period hits possible.

But whenever the film shows people in peril adventuring in the jungle, it gets mean-spirited with the red-shirts' demises, and in a creature feature? That rocks. Also, stick around for the after-credits sequence to get the mother of all teases.

Sean Smithson, Contributor

I bet Willis O'Brien never dreamed the indelible mark his behemoth was going to leave, not just on cinema, but culture in general.

King Kong (1933) is the first film I can remember seeing as a tiny boy living in Baltimore, MD, and by the time Kong lay dead at the base of the Empire State building, I was marked. A movie fanatic was born. Immediately I gravitated to the Harryhausen stuff, Godzilla, and eventually into full on horror.

If any cinematic featured creature is a gateway drug, it's Kong. While Kong: Skull Island may tick some purists off for it's abandonment of the origin story, or the use of CGI, but this isn't Transformers with it's messy jumble of eye-straining set pieces, this is Jurassic Park. Kong also serves as a nice foil to the perfect-specimen heroes of the Marvel universe. I know I can relate to a lumbering giant who is often misunderstood, but just wants to do that right thing. An imperfect hero, yet morally infallible. The Ultimate Outsider.

Plus, kong: Skull Island is just plain bad ass. And that Cannibal Holocaust moment...just saying.

And, call me crazy, but here is to my beloved King Kong '76 as well, my favorite iteration of the Kong myth overall. Again...a misunderstood giant.

Peter Jackson who?

Jim Tudor, Featured Critic

In a world that's become hard wired to take A-list effects driven potboilers seriously, Kong: Skull Island is a relatively satisfying mid-March meal of empty calories and well-rendered spectacle. It roars with the carefully calculated fury of a newfangled studio tentpole desperate to do its "world building" in the service of its "shared universe", but not forgetting to be entertaining in the here and now.

Tom Hiddleston, Bree Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly... all are there, doing their due diligence to explain what's going on, and more importantly, cash paychecks. Yet, even if they have their names above the title, they are still trying only there in service of the big guy who's name leads the title: Kong.

How does the clearly limited ecosystem of the small Skull Island manage to feed the likes of this enormous 100 foot tall King Kong, not to mention assorted other oversized beasts? While it's true that we're witness to Kong's impromptu meal of raw giant squid, there's still not all that many other giant animals around. Meaning, it would seem that there's no possible way these creatures could stay fed. Kong would be hungry all time. No wonder he's so cranky in this film.

I suppose that Kong: Skull Island is as respectable as any semi-generic well-oiled machine is capable of being. It wears its soul on its sleeves and panders at every pre-visualized sharp turn, but it does it pretty well.

Ernesto Zelaya Miñano, Contributor

When I was a kid back in the early 90s, my family took a trip to Universal Studios Florida. I remember being pants-shittingly excited when the giant animatronic ape glared at us puny humans sitting in the trolley car and growled loudly, as if saying “Get the hell away from here”. Watching Skull Island brought back that same giddy feeling; it’s one hell of a rollercoaster ride.

The post-Vietnam War 1970s setting gives this one an entirely unique feel – that soundtrack is straight out of the official ‘Nam Movie Playlist – and sure, you can call it a veiled critique of US Army intervention in foreign conflicts, but let’s face it, we’re all here to see the giant gorilla, and he doesn’t disappoint when he pops up every so often to kick ass and remind everyone that this is his movie and his alone.

The overqualified human cast knows this, and while John C. Reilly comes close to stealing the film and Samuel L. Jackson gets a few patented Badass MF moments, they all take a backseat to Kong. Watching him slap helicopters out of the sky or whacking a giant lizard in the face with a tree made my 9 year-old inner child scream with joy. After all, a film as over-the-top fun as Skull Island is one of the main reasons most of us go to the movies. Jordan Vogt-Roberts proves himself capable of handling massive blockbusters (Colin Trevorrow should take notes); this was a total blast. Long live the King, indeed.

Jaime Grijalba Gomez, Contributing Writer

What I particularly love about this film is that it drops the tradition of the King Kongs of the past, either they be by Cooper, Laurentiis or Jackson, where they respected the big ape a little bit too much for it to be a movie about an ape that likes human girls a little bit too much. This one feels closer to the tradition of Toho and particularly its Godzilla vs. King Kong (1962), which is a silly yet immensely entertaining romp that's just focused on one thing: having fun matching up two of the most iconic monsters in the history of cinema. Kong: Skull Island is just that, it's focused on the action and battles between monsters and doesn't care much about its script or the consequence of the actions that would make sense in a formal narrative. This is just a kaiju film and I like it for what it is.

Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer

If this is how Warner Brothers is going to set the tone with its forthcoming Kaijuniverse (my name, not theirs) then I am completely fine with it. Effortlessly fusing the aesthetic of Jurassic Park and Apocalypse Now with the edgy 'dawn of PG-13' attitude of Temple of Doom, Jordan Vogt-Roberts' artful affectations made me wonder what would happen if Indy IV instead skipped past the Soviets and aliens and went straight to 'Nam. Alternatively, it teases a lost late-1980s Spielberg jungle-combat film that might have been released in the sweet spot between Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.

Either way, it is enough to be thankful for what we get with Kong: Skull Island, a cinematic do-over of the shit-show that was Jurassic World, here with a fine collection of character actors who get the job done to just the right degree when faced with spectacular nonsense. A serious, but not too serious, glee has been missing from the multiplex, at least to these tired eyes, which is satisfyingly remedied here.

Where Skull Island lacks the 'beauty and the beast' angle nominally associated with King Kong stories, it more than makes up for it by setting the tone early, that of endless possible action promised by all of those 1930s adventurism-gone-wrong adventures. It also miraculously (in a melancholy world where gajillions of dollars are spent on Transformers and Avengers movies) keeps the wind in its sails with a variegated visual palette and some camera set ups that indicate, to this franchise loathing cinephile anyway, that someone out there in Hollywood still gives a damn. No fault to Guillermo del Toro and Pacific Rim, but I was bored with those dark rainy set pieces and half-assed story elements seemed only partially explored in that one. Skull Island scratched a goddamn itch I didn't know was even bothering me, bless its heart.

The concept of 'leave well enough alone' or 'we create our own monsters' is finger-poked just enough to give a meta side-wink, but still offer some sort of "Life will Find A Way" lesson for the kiddies.

James Marsh, Asian Editor

There’s no denying that Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island looks great, but beneath the beautifully rendered CGI monsters and eerily atmospheric scenery, this big screen revival for the giant ape has precious little meat on its bones. Interestingly enough it is John C Reilly’s marooned WWII pilot - a character who seemed tonally out of place in the trailers - who emerges as the film’s best character. Elsewhere, the packed ensemble of top tier talent, including Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, offers scant characterisation beyond the broadest of stereotypes. Any one of them could be excised from the film completely without affecting anything that occurs onscreen. The worst offender, however, is Jing Tian, in one of the most gratuitous examples to-date of a Chinese element being added to a Hollywood blockbuster solely to attract mainland interest. Jing’s character doesn’t even say anything for the first half of the film, after which her contributions are cripplingly perfunctory, raising the question of whether her character was even in the script at all.

Vogt-Roberts is clearly delighted with the film’s 70s setting, as he plunders the Vietnam movie playlist for all its worth, while borrowing liberally from Apocalypse Now and Jurassic Park in his efforts to create tension. On top of that, his fetishisation of analogue tech - from slide projectors and turntables to 8mm film footage - would make Wes Anderson groan.

All in all, this was gorgeous spectacle in dire need of a story to tell, a film constructed to service its marketing campaign rather than the other way round. All that said, I’m still pumped to see Kong square off against Godzilla in 2020. Let’s just hope the script remembers to add an engaging human element next time out.

Eric Ortiz Garcia, Contributor

Kong: Skull Island is not really in the vein of the remakes of the 1933 classic, released in 1976 and 2005 respectively. We just have to remember the proverb that appears at the beginning of the original film, with an emphasis on the relation between “the beauty and the beast”. Young actress Brie Larson is in this new version as a photojournalist involved in the expedition, but her eventual interaction with the beast is reduced to a handful of scenes, being more a reference to the predecessors than the main plot point.

Having the final part of the Vietnam War as historic context (and the Apocalypse Now vibe) is a good indication of the film’s real intentions; Jordan Vogt-Roberts is closer to the action and combat sequences than to the story we all know. Kong, in fact, appears to attack since the first sequence, something that is not quite common in the giant monster films.

That’s precisely the key to Kong: Skull Island. It’s a different movie about Kong, in which the supposedly human protagonists (Tom Hiddleston and Larson) don’t even shine above an ensemble cast which includes John C. Reilly as a WWII veteran who functions as a good comic relief, and also to help the new visitors to have empathy for the natives and their king. Thus the conflict between a bloodthirsty Samuel L. Jackson - as a soldier who wants to destroy Kong - and the real heroes is there, though Kong: Skull Island is definitely not as emotive, nor epic, as its predecessors.

While Kong fighting against other creatures is something that comes from the 1933 film, here this spectacle is the real attraction since the return of the iconic character is part of the so called MonsterVerse. In that sense, and after experiencing the glorious chaos of Kong: Skull Island, 2020’s Godzilla vs. Kong looks quite promising.

Stuart Muller, Contributing Writer

The latest Kong is a beast of a movie. Very little tenderness, and a lot of awesomeness.

It's a very different film to Peter Jackson's King Kong - the only thing in common really is the ape - so comparisons would be unfair. That being said, I unabashedly love Jackson's Kong, and this love is in significant part due to the rich relationship between Kong and Darrow. The new Kong film, by comparison, just dips a toe into the human-ape relationship. The result is a version of Kong unencumbered by the complex psychology and human-ape drama of the original story, and the ride is both more riotously fun and less emotionally satisfying.

Taken as the first film in a revamped franchise, this approach makes sense; slowly build the universe and his character before developing the inevitable Kong-damsel relationship. It does, however, squander the potential of some incredible actors who, bar Samuel Jackson, don't get much to work with. I'm sure they are seen as an investment in future chapters though, and should have ample opportunity to shine as the role of their relationship with Kong grows.

But that was not the point of this Kong. This Kong is king of fun! It has been some time since I laughed out loud with giddy joy at the spectacle unfolding on screen, and I did so repeatedly during this film. For now though, my heart still lies with Jackson's telling, but any world with two great modern Kong films is a world I'm content to live in!

Jason Gorber, Featured Critic

Check this week's AnarchyVision to see my take on Kong: Skull Island:

And there we have it: an eclectic collection of opinions, ranging from 'bad', to 'meh...', to 'cool', to 'great'!

So, what did you think of the film? Chime in, in the comments below, and HAVE YOUR SAY!