the river and the dinosaur

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2017)

I suppose this works as entertainment and it fails utterly as something more, although if you look a bit into it, you will see how this island is full with the bones of potential creative richness.
The core concept was the overlapping of two ideas. You have Conrad's metaphor of going up the river, not directly through Conrad but with the Vietnam filter Coppola put on it (his interest was in turn triggered by an abandoned first project by Welles). And you have the obvious exotic lost paradise location full of dangerous otherworldly creatures, who exist in the cinematic world of Jurassic Park, not of the previous Kong films.
The first concept was, i think, a creative choice. The second was a producers requirement. The rest of the film, with the required references, jokes, etc. follows these two guidelines and becomes literally a battle between these two visions, a battle obviously won by the producers vision. We are left with nothing at the end. But it's still fun to try and guess where and how the studio twisted the vision of the writers - not knowing any other work of this director, i don't know on which side he was. Anyway:
-Sam Jackson plays Kurtz, but he channels his Jurassic Park mad performance;
-the boat made of scraps from the crashed planes was the prop with more potential. It's visual, it's interesting, and could work in a Herzog way. Yet it is rendered to near uselessness, because Sam Jackson wants to blow up Kong instead of going down the river (get it?)
-Marlow is merely supporting here. He has lived in the island for 28 years, but calls none of the shots (not even the mad ones). Eventually he leaves the tribe of natives, another nod to Conrad, and goes back to his former world;
-Where they screwed this up the worst, in my opinion, was in how the Hiddleston/Larson characters were handled. He is named "Conrad", but She is the photographer/reporter, the one designated writer/storyteller on screen. We even "see" many of the photos she takes, get the world through her lenses. SHE should be Conrad, not him. But again the producer's vision prevails, and they needed a "girl in distress to be saved" and in the process produce the 2 visually obvious references to the previous Kong films.
Go on, and place here the references that you can find: helicopters against an orange sky, the forced Vietnam bits, the Full Metal Jacket nods, Bowie vs Doors references, and whatever you feel like finding out and filling in. In our age of irony, filtered through nostalgia, i supposed this film will have its place, and the nodding head of Nixon may be read under recent political events in America (although it was most certainly filmed before the last American election). This viewer had fun, but in the end has left the island with nothing more than the memory of a few skulls that could have been kings.