Whatever happened to Kong?

Rating: 7/10 (23 March 2017)

My brother and me used to watch it Down at the bar Taking the TV remote from guys More used to the playing of Die Hard
Swing the fist to the side to the side To the side to the side to the fist the fist Swing the fist to the side to the side Kong Ammo in the machine gun
Now virtually everyone's watching A popular show But I still believe in In the excellent joy of the Kong
To the side to the side to the fist the fist The swing of the fist to the side to the side To the side to the side to the fist the fist Kong Ammo in the machine gun
Now if they take it HG Wells Well, I'll be on the first flight To a time before the pong Whatever happened to Kong?
Swing of the fist to the side to the side To the side to the side to the fist the fist Swing the fist to the side to the side Kong Ammo in the machine gun
(apologies to Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV)
Okay, this might seem a little bizarre to the average reader, but I just couldn't help myself. Pong...Kong; the transition is obvious. True enough, some of the lyrics in Frank Black's excellent song don't lend themselves terribly well to the subject at hand, but what do I care. I liked Kong: Skull Island, it was a reasonably satisfying old fashioned monster movie, with a heavy dose of Apocalypse Now and a tiny smidgeon of Predator thrown in for good measure (Mr Jackson didn't say "if it bleeds, we can kill it", but he might as well have). However, it serves less well as a 'sequel' to the 2005 film by Peter Jackson. Firstly, In Kong: Skull Island, which is set approximately 50 years after King Kong, the locals seem to have transformed from menacing, woman-kidnapping, human sacrifice-making people into some kind of enlightened Buddist-lite haven of niceness. Secondly, where are the dinosaurs? They were everywhere the first time round, now just 50 years later (they had clearly survived millions upon millions of years there, let's not forget) they've all mysteriously disappeared! Thirdly, in King Kong, Kong appeared to be on his own (we reason this is why he falls for the charms of Naomi Watts?), but in Kong: Skull Island, we find out Kong had a family but they were all killed by the 'skullcrawlers'....er, hold the phone there for a second. Skullcrawlers? Where the hell did they spring from all of a sudden? Is this Skull Island in a parallel dimension or something? It's the same island, but all the inhabitants seem to have fundamentally changed apart from Kong himself! Except even he has changed - it can't be the same Kong we encountered in King Kong, because of course he was killed in New York. We might accept there was a young kong relative (perhaps a son) who was left behind and grew up to replace him, but how is it that an apparently sole ape produced offspring and continued to rule the roost when the aforementioned dinosaurs (of which there were plenty) all failed to keep breeding? Maybe Plato was onto something after all...did I say Plato? I meant Aristotle. Who's this Plato guy anyway? Just as well it wasn't billed as a sequel, then. I have just one other beef with Kong: Skull Island - character development (or, rather, lack thereof). The poor chaplain seemed to exist only to a) get eaten by a skullcrawler, and b) provide a character for the actor doing Kong's motion-capture performance, a la Andy Sirkis in King Kong; Sirkis' sideshow was much the better- written character, I might add. Most of the survivors barely merited their survivor status, which was a pity - perhaps the monsters didn't like the taste of cardboard. John C Riley's character, Hank Marlow (a WWII US pilot who survived crash-landing on the island), is the primary exception. In fact, he is the beating heart of the film, and his promised survival and reconciliation with civilisation, and his family, are what keep us engaged and rooting for them to escape from Skull Island.