We Deserved Better

Rating: 2/10 (14 February 2019)

If one film could possibly represent everything that I fervently hate about the entire medium, it would be Jordan Vogt-Roberts Kong: Skull Island. While I initially found it enjoyable as a sort of "so bad, it's good" disaster, my opinions on its impact, its implications, its themes and its ambition (Or lack thereof) have become increasingly more negative over time. In many ways, King Kong represents one of the most enduring and iconic figures of old Hollywood. More people would be likely to recognize the soulful 25-foot gorilla than they would Errol Flynn's Robin Hood or Orson Welles Charles Kane. So to see a film show such disrespect, such carelessness, such lack of effort in a film centered on him absolutely breaks my heart.
John C. Reilly's Hank Marlowe marks the film's only likable or interesting character. Reilly's comedic presence wasn't nearly as forced as I previously worried and I found myself genuinely rooting for him to get off the island and get reunited with the family he had lost hope of ever seeing again. His return home to his shocked and emotional family is the only moment of any genuine pathos in the entire movie. Kong: Skull Island makes an attempt at developing Samuel L. Jackson's Preston Packard, and Jackson is at least trying his best, but there really is nothing to this character. He's a watered down cross between Captain Ahab and The Lost World: Jurassic Park's Roland Tembo and nothing more. The film can occasionally veer into the direction of unintentional comedy. Tom Hiddleston cutting down giant bats in slow-mo with a katana in a fog of toxic gas straight-up feels like something out of an Uwe Boll video game adaptation and the film deciding to rip off Jurassic Park III of all things during an encounter with the Skull Crawlers (Where we can see and hear the flash of a camera from an unlucky victim its just eaten...Through a fog of smoke in the distance, no less.) is almost surreal to witness.
Kong: Skull Island is every bit a committee film made in reactionary response to the criticisms against Gareth Edward's (underrated) Godzilla movie. You can see the pandering attempts to address every problem people had with that film in every frame of Skull Island. Too much human drama? Make all the human characters even less developed and interesting than the side characters of an MCU film that only exist to drop one-liners. Too long of a wait to see Godzilla? Show Kong as soon as possible with no sense of spectacle or buildup at all and continue to show him over and over again until he loses all weight and power as a monster. Tone too dark and serious? Shove as much comedy into the film as possible until it comes out of your ears. Rinse and repeat with nearly every criticism that Godzilla was accused of. This is not a film, it's a lazily slapped together product made on a checklist.
Apart from Jackson and Reilly, the cast couldn't be more obvious in how little they're invested in their roles. It's almost not worth it to distinguish between the performance of Tom Hiddleston or Brie Larson or even the tremendously talented John Goodman because all their performances are practically the same. They showed up, read their lines and that's it. There are no interesting acting choices, no memorable moments from their performances, nothing. This is the kind of acting I almost hate most of all because it gives me nothing to say other than that they were clearly phoning it in.
It says a lot about this film's characters when it spends a significant amount of time building up Toby Kebbell trying to make it back to his son and then kills him before the halfway point with no resolution. Don't even get me started on Kong himself, he is a joke in this film. His "emotional bonding" scene with Brie Larson is one of the worst things I've seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in recent years. It's so forced and comes so far out of nowhere that it almost feels like a parody of a King Kong film. It'd be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.
Whether intentional or not, the reversal of the environmentalist themes of Godzilla (2014) may be the worst aspect of all to be found in Skull Island (And that is a feat given how incompetent and terrible this film is.) Within minutes of arriving on the island, our "heroes" immediately start recklessly dropping bombs to piss of Kong, killing numerous animals and peaceful wildlife living there. It's treated as this heroic, "badass" moment for them, full of smiles and quips, like the untold death and destruction they're wrecking is somehow a game. The only reason they regret their actions later on is because it put their lives in danger, but they wouldn't even be in this mess if they hadn't been indiscriminately blowing up everything they see like a 14 year playing Gary's Mod.
If you're a serious, hardcore Kaiju fan who went into Kong: Skull Island loving Godzilla (2014) and you think this is a great movie, I'm not going to say you're wrong. Hell, I wish I loved the damn thing. I'm going to say that you deserved better. You deserved better when it came to the first King Kong film in your major Hollywood shared MonsterVerse, you're dedicated, loyal fans who didn't have to settle for generic and dumb. Honestly, my heart goes out to you most of all. Because if anyone was owed a proper King Kong movie, it was you. And you know what? You still do.