Best of the Kong remakes

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 2017)

The original 1933 film King Kong was such a hit that studios have been reviving the big ape ever since. There were sequels, there were a couple of Japanese things, and in the 70s there was a painfully slow and tedious movie only notable for containing Jessica Lange's all- time worst performance.
More recently Peter Jackson attempted to turn the story into a LOTR- style epic, resulting in a few good scenes drowned in sheer bulk.
Skull Island is in some ways a return to the simplicity of the original. There's a giant ape on an island of monsters, there's a bunch of people getting killed, and there's a lot of action.
The shortest Kong movie in some time, coming in at well under two hours, the film gets in a lot of action and even has room for a madness-of-war, Vietnam-inspired undercurrent (which feels a little random but basically works).
The best action scene is Kong versus the helicopters. It's a very intense sequence that, like many scenes in the movie, is a sort of call-back to something in the original. It's unfortunate that the movie can't match that scene elsewhere, but it's generally quite entertaining all the same. I do think it's possible that if you edited the Jackson film from 3 hours to the length of this one it might be the better movie, but based on what was released, Skull Island is easily the best Kong reboot.
Skull Island isn't too attached to the original story, which is fine by me. It even virtually ditches the whole ape/girl romance, which went from obsessive love in the original to weirdly sexual in the 70s to girl-as-pet from Jackson to a sort of mutual respect thing in this one.
The movie also stays on the island - no empire state building this time around. There's room for a sequel, but I hope this franchise continues to do its own thing.