If you are a writer, this is an interesting film to watch.

Rating: 6/10 (9 March 2017)

What do I mean by the summary? Essentially the film is not quite the sum of its parts.
Lets start with what every writer knows you need for a good story - beginning, middle and end. The film starts with a quick flashback to ww2, then moves through the decades until we get to the 70's. People want to go to skull island. And a group of people go there. But I was never sure of the exact reason why everyone was going. This was because there were too many characters. The script should have got rid of half of them, or merged them into one person, otherwise they clogged the story.
But maybe someone said that the more people who land on the island, the more ways you have to kill them, so they stayed in the script. And what we get is an hour of people being killed. The only characters that you have any interest in a Samuel Jackson's and John C. Reilly's. They are great in their respective roles. One wants to kill Kong, the other wants to save him. And if you had two hours of that it would have been a great film. But instead there is the ticking clock of trying to get off the island before the rescue team leave, and the threat of being eaten by the baddie creatures.
The end was weak. I found it interesting that they showed what happened to Reilly's character as the epilogue, again probably because he was the star of the show.
The cinematography was good, and the special effects were as well. Tom Hiddlestones acting was weak, but that might be because his character was badly written. Like many of the others, he had no character arc, and merely said a few lines ever couple of minutes.
The music was good, but that maybe an age thing (and could it also be the reason why I liked the two older actors the best?) I went with my son, and he thought it was OK, but would have liked more jokes.
Maybe that it the issue with the film as a whole. No one wants to make a 150 million special effects comedy; you don't want to fall into the Jurassic Park camp of throwing kids onto the island and watch them try to escape. You want the option of making a film good enough to stand on its own, but with enough avenues to create a series.
There were times when I sat watching it, thinking how I would have written it. So is it worth watching? Yes, but only on the big screen, and only once.