Bad Pacing, Tone Changes Galore, and Horrid Writing

Rating: 3/10 (29 March 2017)

Kong: Skull Island follows a scientist who, upon discovering an uncharted island, decides to take a team there to explore it in the hopes of discovering new species or something of that sort. Coincidentally, that's the same island that King Kong lives on, along with multiple other monsters.
The movie basically blows through the whole beginning, introducing the characters and basic motivations. For the most part, I was fine with that, but once they reach the island the characters themselves cease to have character, though they had little before. They're just robots with an objective. When the movie tries to develop two characters' relationship at one point, the conversation is just playful banter that lasts all of 30 seconds. It's a formula for developing characters that has worked to show how well actors can play off each other, but it doesn't work here because of how generic and rushed it is. Furthermore, one particular character gets thrown into the mix way too early. I don't want to spoil his role for those who don't know, but it's John C. Reilly's character. He shows up in the first 30 minutes, and in context it doesn't make sense.
I mostly went to this movie because every review I read or watched said that Kong himself was great, so I figured it'd at least be a fun time at the movies that would be better in a cinema. Sure, Kong was good, for all three of his scenes. Seriously, I started to forget that this was a King Kong movie. And it seemed like the writers forgot too, because he kinda just showed up on occasion to remind the audience what the movie was called. He wasn't even the biggest threat on Skull Island, he was just kind of there.
As far as the exciting parts of this movie go, the action set pieces are great. They set up for something epic and exciting. But the action itself often falls kind of flat. Sure, it's mostly fun, but it's kind of dumb too. And some shots based around these sets don't make sense. There's a point where the characters are looking down at a dip in the land with giant bones in it. Then they go down and it's full of green fog that varies in thickness. So where did the fog come from? How is it that they could see clearly from above, but barely could from within? It just doesn't make sense, and in Kong's opening scene the time of day constantly switches between midday to late evening, and it's so distracting. Sure, it's a pretty shot, but it took me out of the action, and that isn't a good thing. And in addition to that, a lot of the cool monsters you may have seen in the trailers are better in the trailer than in the movie. Lot's of monster fights happen before we can even care about any of the characters, so when people are dying I was simply detached. But the fights proved to be so short-lived that there was no time to really even get excited. Again, the set pieces are great but the action itself is mediocre.
I'm sure most people saw 'The Jungle Book' from 2016 and noticed how great the CGI is. So my question now is, how is it that a whole year later we can get bad CGI? Seriously, there were scenes in this movie where the monsters and the characters were together and it looked horribly fake. It was actually pretty cringe-worthy at times, and I did. A lot. It got to the point where my friend next to me asked if I wanted to leave. I still saw it through, though. But man, it all looked so fake. It looked like a video game, and not one where graphics were the main concern. The monsters themselves were cool, sure, but they just didn't look real.
And on top of that, the tone was all over the place. First the characters are excited, then it's serious, then their laughing and playing records and having fun, then their dying, then they start laughing again. It's like it tried to use comedy sometimes but instead they just destroyed the tone. It was so inconsistent in this way, and again it distances the audience from the movie. It abruptly removes you from where you just were to relocate you to a new box of feelings, and that journey is just awkward and weird. It's like the movie really doesn't know what it is, but it's trying to find itself.
Despite all this, the movie gets better towards the end. By the last half hour, it is where it should have been at the beginning in terms of characters. So there was a level of excitement, and the expected fight with Kong versus big bad monster proves to be a great time, and moreover tends to be rather well shot.
Overall Kong: Skull Island was a movie where the lack of characters made it difficult to get invested, and as such the result was a garbage fire. It's not an enjoyable movie. It's not pretty, it's not interesting, and it's barely even fun. The actors tried their best with what they were given, and I admired how willing the movie was about killing off major characters at points other than the very end, but still there was nothing to save this movie where it was. There is a good movie hidden in here somewhere, I am certain of that, but it isn't this one. In the end I would advise you to avoid this movie and wait for it to come to Netflix if you haven't seen it, like the last Godzilla movie did. Contrary to expectations of excitement, this is a rather boring movie, and the price of admission is simply not worth your hard-earned money.