Spoiler Warning: This discussion contains some spoilers. It could be an entire gag from a comedy or in-depth conversation concerning events in the second act.
"That was an unconventional encounter."
Kong: Skull Island, the intentionally divergent 2017 remake of the essential classic, is a confused movie. This version removes the beautiful simplicity of the 1933 masterwork but simultaneously eliminates the unfortunate congestion of Peter Jackson’s attempted 2005 reworking. Instead, what we have here is a hybrid of Apocalypse Now, King Kong and an insipid mixture of slapstick comedy and ersatz melodrama.
From the outset, this feels so incredibly constructed. The cast has no real connection, nor are they ever given much space to execute any charisma. Simply, everyone feels like a marketing choice. It does not help matters that there are about twenty human characters that the film wants to keep a track of, and much like its MonsterVerse predecessor Godzilla, the humans are hardly as interesting as the monster in question. Entire subplots about characters’ children fall flat on their face, and many don’t have enough character expansion to care if they make it off Skull Island alive. Throw in Samuel L. Jackson as the Vietnam vet gone bad, and you’ve got unmotivated cliched characterisations to boot. The film’s most entertaining elements are John C. Reilly’s semi-comedic turn and the excellent motion capture of Kong by Toby Kebbell and Terry Notary.
I think the most noteworthy quality that this has is an attempt in the filmmaking to provide something beyond rudimentary direction outside of the action sequences. Vogt-Roberts moves to make every frame a wallpaper, an image that could be on the poster, even if it halts the narrative for longer than you might appreciate. See the fifteen-or-so visual plays on Apocaplypse Now mostly, in the opening helicopter setpiece. A more ridiculous example would be Tom Hiddlestone slicing through dinosaurs with a katana in a cloud of poisonous green gas in slow motion. Kong is the greatest beneficiary of the style, always imposing and monstrously gigantic, the monster design and his placement in the frame never misses.
The Vietnam War era iconography has a steady, somewhat overbearing presence throughout all of this. It is quite a strange decision to fetishise and glorify journalistic footage of the war in this style. Larson’s character captures trademark poses of soldiers, conflict in this joyful way that makes you forget these images would plague American screens for twenty years and would lead to one of the greatest eras of protest in American history. This seems to forget that, and much of its veneration of images like napalm seared jungles feels slightly off. I was also surprised to find only two Creedence Clearwater Revival tracks on the official soundtrack; in the process of watching it, it felt like an entire album. I don’t despise the visual and sonic coherence with the era, especially as someone born far beyond the conflict, and that the epoch is far in the past. It’s just not the most delicate handling of war motifs I have ever seen.
The biggest problem with Kong: Skull Island is not that it’s boring like Peter Jackson’s efforts, and I actually applaud it for trying something more than the 1933 original; it’s that everything feels forced. There are, almost certainly, huge elements of this cut-out, and it shows. Vogt-Roberts may be a competent filmmaker, and he is obviously having a great amount of fun with the Vietnam iconography, but none of it serves a proficient narrative. There are some very entertaining elements to the film overall; I just wish the entire runtime was treated with such conviction. Kong is King, easily supplying the most gleeful moments of big-screen destruction, that is for sure.
Connor Clarke Film 