Damn… You know, I was really looking forward to this one.
The follow-up release to 2014's (very good) Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island was directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer – also a very good movie) and stars – here goes – Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel Jackson, John Goodman, Toby Kebbell, and Corey Hawkins, and is the second film in Legendary's Monsterverse. It's a pretty different take on King Kong as we know him and takes place just after the Vietnam War. Sounds pretty good, right?
In fact, it does. The movie we got, though, wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. To be clear, it wasn't entirely terrible, but it just wasn't too good either – kinda like how I felt about Suicide Squad. But, like Suicide Squad, there are things to like about Skull Island, and I'll talk about those before I get into what this movie gets wrong.
I enjoyed a lot of sequences in Skull Island, especially in the first half. There were a lot of really great shots and sequences in the first thirty minutes, and I was hooked – I was actually really enjoying it. The feel of those first thirty minutes reminded me, in many ways, of an Indiana Jones movie with a lot of Vietnam War flourishes here and there. Hell, the intro to the movie was a pretty kick-ass way to set the movie up, I'll give it that.
And me, personally, being a sucker for war films, I really dug the idea of having the movie take place around the time of the Vietnam War because there really is a lot you could do with that setting.
Lets not forget to talk about the King.
As for this particular rendition/portrayal of King Kong, I do have mixed feelings about (which I'll get to in a while), but it was pretty awesome seeing him throw down with the other monsters on the island – humans included. The opening scene aside, his introduction to the main characters was pretty awesome. Remember that scene in the first trailer when he chucks a tree into a Huey? That was how we were introduced to him as an actual force to be reckoned with, and it was bad-ass.
Some of the new animals are pretty cool-looking, too, and there's a lot of action to keep you entertained throughout the two hours you'll spend sitting in the theater.
They drop a couple of F-bombs in here, too.
This movie also really pushes the limits of its PG-rating (here in the Philippines, at least) and has quite a bit of violence and tension in it. There's a scene in this movie where someone gets impaled through the mouth, and when that happened, one of the kids sitting behind me audibly gasped. That was awesome.
The soundtrack was pretty awesome, too.
In the end, though, I do feel that those were all the movie really had to offer. Like I mentioned earlier, this movie just wasn't quite as good as I wanted it to be, and let me explain why by starting with the characters.
I couldn't care less about the characters in this movie. They were flat, shallow, uninteresting, and lacking so poorly in personality, they might as well should have been anyone. While the ensemble's story is distributed well across the span of the movie, none of the people in this ensemble are developed enough to make you care about whether or not they live through this adventure, which is a shame because this movie does have a truly good cast - a great one, even.
I expected Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, and John Goodman to be good in the movie, but none of them really owned their roles. They could've been played by anyone else and it wouldn't have made a difference. The only one who really does own his character is John Reilly, but only because the character was pretty much made to be played by him. No one really has any motivation behind them – save a few – and they're just boring. Dull.
In the end, the only folks with any reason behind their involvement in anything in this movie are Toby Kebbell and Samuel Jackson.
You can tell he's had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane.
As a whole, I felt the cast in this movie, for all the talent they collectively possess, was under-utilized and pretty wasted.
And no one is really helped by the hammy writing in this movie. A lot of the dialog is clunky, and the attempts this movie tries to make to be funny really don't land. At all. I kinda felt a red flag go up once I saw what they were going for in the second trailer, but I was at least hoping that the strange brand of humor in here wouldn't overpower any of the scenes, or at least try to overpower them. It did, and I didn't buy into any of it. This, in particular, disappointed me because I know that this director knows how to handle comedy and comedic timing (as seen in The Kings of Summer). I feel like this is one of those movies that used up all their good lines in the trailers (which they probably did).
The movie is tonally unbalanced, too. Like I said, the first thirty minutes of the movie were good. I was digging the whole Indiana Jones-meets-Vietnam War thing as the movie progressed, but it sorta just abandons it around forty-five minutes through. The rest of it just feels like your run-of-the-mill monster movie. The tonal shifts were pretty jarring and gave me the impression that the movie, as a whole, was unfocused. Very unfocused.
If were gonna make comparisons here, at least 2014's Godzilla had a constant sense of terror and mystery to compensate for its under-cooked characters, and 2005's King Kong (otherwise known as the Peter Jackson one) knew what it was and went down that direction consistently, as well. As for Skull Island, it really doesn't know what it was trying to be. Was it trying to be a watered-down, Jäger-less version of Pacific Rim or was it trying to be Indiana Jones-meets-Vietnam War? Or was it trying to be something different altogether? I'll never know, and we'll never know.
Now, I'll get into this movie's portrayal of King Kong.
I'm not sure whether I just didn't like what they did here or just downright hated it, but the way Kong was represented here felt more like a man doing motion-capture than it did a giant ape (which, by the way, he is). He didn't feel like an animal – in fact, none of the monsters in Skull Island felt like animals. They all just feel like monsters and that just removed any sense of believability this movie might've had.
But, but, Rafa – Godzilla is a giant lizard. Giant animals on their own are soooo realistic!
Okay, look – I understand that a giant f*cking ape on an uncharted island is hardly a believable idea on its own, but at least try to make the creatures in this movie seem like animals that just so happen to be freaks of nature instead of monsters. That was what made Godzilla and the MUTOs from 2014 so interesting to watch – because they felt like animals and made the audience feel as if they were watching two big-ass animals kick the shit out of each other.
Personally, Godzilla was such a good adaptation of the creature because Godzilla was portrayed the way its makers intended it to be portrayed back in 1954. The giant lizard we got onscreen three years ago was the realization of a 60-year-old dream. This portrayal of Kong hardly felt like the gorilla he was meant to be – he felt like a giant man.
Hell, even Peter Jackson's version of King Kong felt more like an animal than this one, in spite of the other dinosaurs on the island feeling like monsters. In this one, literally everything feels like a monster, and that really just let me down.
In the end, Skull Island was disappointing. While it does have a lot of cool moments and some kick-ass action here and there, it forces you to spend a lot of time with characters it doesn't develop and sit through hammy writing and a very uneven tone. It's not completely terrible, don't get me wrong – its just not as good as I wanted it to be. Its a fun, mindless popcorn flick for sure, and it does that pretty well. But as a follow-up to Godzilla? Not so good. I will say Kong: Skull Island merits a Sour Jar Jar, in my book.
So, have you seen Kong: Skull Island? Let me know what you thought about it by leaving a comment below. And, as always, this has been Rafa. Stay classy.
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