Not bad, not bad at all

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2017)

23 March 2017 Film of Choice at The Plaza Dorchester Tonight - Kong: Skull Island. Yet another remake of the old classic King Kong. Each time we revisit this story it gets bigger and more fanciful, but each time the visual effects can be more awe inspiring. This particular outing ticked a lot of boxes for me. We have a group of scientists, a platoon of soldiers due to return home from the Vietnam war, and a man running an expedition with a hidden agenda, put all these factions together on an island inhabited by monsters and there is bound to be bloodshed. Tom Hiddleston smouldered in slow motion as a man hired for his tracking skills, Brie Larson tossed her hair provocatively as the pushy woman photographer and Samuel L Jackson delivered an epic performance as Lt Col Packard, a man who is not yet ready to leave the war and who is letting his fighting spirit cloud his decision making process. This group of people made odd bedfellows but add a tribe of non speaking painted natives, a huge primate and some outstandingly ugly reptilian monsters and you have a movie that keeps you interested from start to finish. Filmed in Hawaii and Australia, we are introduced to some stunning landscape which proves to be barbaric in its' beauty as our group battles to survive all that nature and the unnatural can throw at them. A much better telling of the Kong tale, will there be another?