Review - Kong: Skull Island - Surprisingly enjoyable.

Rating: 7/10 (10 March 2017)

Man, the tone in this film is all over the place and I mean that in the best way possible. It never stops feeling strange, but it also never feels wrong, either. We'll be enjoying a light-hearted scene set to the tune of a '70s rock song. Suddenly, gruesomely, fatally, we have a terrifying encounter with an enormous monster. Then we're back with another '70s hit over a montage as our protagonists journey to their next obstacle. It's bizarre, and it works.
If you're expecting to see that same Kong story with which you are familiar, alter those expectations radically. Kong never leaves Skull Island, never kidnaps a blonde, and is around five times larger than you've ever seen him before (unless you saw Japan's 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla). Unlike the original film, Skull Island is set in 1973, immediately after Nixon pulls out of Vietnam, and, oh, boy, do the filmmakers have fun with this. As well as the aforementioned soundtrack, the score, cinematography, even the film's posters all channel the era, with nods to Apocalypse Now sometimes taking up entire scenes.
This isn't to take away too much from the creativity of the film. The excellent cinematography is the work of Larry Fong, who's done a bunch of Zack Snyder films, and the CGI is phenomenal, with a couple of very small exceptions with regard to the small(er) animals that drifted just a little too far into the uncanny.
Our characters (a helicopter squadron and a group of scientists, neatly separated by colour, as well as a tracker, a photographer, and three members of the mysterious organisation "Monarch", which you may remember from 2014's Godzilla) head to the strange island after picking it up for the first time via satellite (what if something good's there and the Russians get it!?). After Kong, they also meet the other denizens of the island – enormous buffaloes and spiders, new, fictional monstrosities, and good old human natives. At this point the objectives of the characters divide; some want to flee the island, some want to hide and wait for rescue, others still enter Ahab territory and are resolved to take down the big gorilla himself.
The screenplay has obviously gone over a couple of drastic revisions. Characters say things like "this happened in '72", which is a little weird, because the film is set in '73. Why not just say "last year"? I can only guess that the year in which the film is set changed during pre/production.
Tom Hiddleston and John Goodman are solid. Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson somehow manage to deliver excellent performances in a very silly (but fun!) movie. John C. Reilly is great, blending that great sense of humour and timing with just the right dosage of sobering heartbreak that comes with being stranded on an island for thirty years; he crashed during World War II.
Many cute references are sprinkled throughout the film, and done so in a charmingly subtle way; "Hold onto your butts" says Jackson's character. I breathed a sigh of relief when they elected not to actually play Ride of the Valkyries during an already extremely Apocalypse-Nowy sequence. It's actually a pretty clever movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised.