Thhrrrp

Rating: 4/10 (26 August 2018)

Kong: Skull Island is a big let-down as far as I'm concerned. I don't care that this isn't the classic King Kong narrative we're used to-the entire point of a remake is, after all, to build off of or change the original in some way.
What I do care about is that this is a monster movie that fails in a number of regards. The biggest problem is that this movie doesn't know if it wants to be a weird kaiju-centric remake of Moby Dick, an environmentalist film or a cheeseball monster movie. So Jordan Vordt-Roberts said "**** it, let's do all of them". The result has all of the tonal whiplash you'd expect, plus the complete inability to do any of those ideas justice. I didn't even mention the utterly godawful script and bizarre shifts in style.
The '5' then is for at least delivering some cool monster-fighting, CGI and general braindead entertainment. In fact the only improvement over 2014's Godzilla (the first MonsterVerse film) is that this one is better at showing off the main character. Kong has immediate presence where Godzilla was hidden by darkness, dust, more darkness and that movie's editor. Godzilla, on the other hand, knew what it wanted to be, and did that fairly well. This, on the whole, does not.