It Doesn't Put King Kong on a Pedestal

Rating: 8/10 (8 April 2017)

The highest praise I can give this movie, it is not just a retelling of King Kong. I was introduced to the character with the 1933 original as a kid, watched it again with the 76 remake, and sat through the the 2005 Peter Jackson version. I will start fires if I have to watch another origin story in my lifetime. Instead, Skull Island is moving the series in an actual direction building up to the upcoming Godzilla crossover. And I would rate it a step up from the American Godzilla predecessor.
Visually the movie looks great. The monsters are fascinating to look at, the giant water buffalo are especially well done with the algae hanging from their horns and soulful eyes. The massive spider is more stylized with its gnashing claws and 'meaty' webbing but doesn't look hokey. And Kong himself is very detailed and quite expressive, its easy to see where the effects budget went and it was money well spent. But there is also artistry that went into presenting it. Scenes like Kong standing before the sunset, his silhouette blurred by the light, and his eyes piercing through the night mist as he draws close are more memorable than the actual action scenes. The only real complaint I have is the design of the skull crawlers themselves. Seeing all these interesting creatures, a two legged lizard is kind of a disappointment in comparison. They don't look like the credible threat they pose to Kong and the big, bad one looks too similar to the smaller jobbers to make it stand out.
Characters are pretty good at best to acceptable at worst, the best being Goodman's Bill Randa and John C Reily's Hank Marlow, but what they do with them is rather underwhelming. To cull the large cast, many o the cannon fodder characters are killed off pretty early but you kind of see how they all die in the first ten minutes. Either they are swallowed whole, stomped or otherwise crushed, or swatted into the distance, and rarely in new or creative ways. After seeing three people get stepped on, the impact is quickly lost. The key characters don't get much better treatment. The captain with the major insignia, swallowed. Bill, swallowed. Samuel Jackson, crushed by Kong. The soldier with an AK for reasons, he gets a little something different but its still pretty much him being swat into a cliff. His death is probably the most frustrating as it at first seems like it is going to have more significance. He is ready to sacrifice himself to kill the giant skull crawler but no, it turns out to be completely meaningless. I will give San some credit for surviving. When she was introduced without a single line of dialogue I was sure she was screwed.
Tom Hiddleston as James Conrad is pretty wooden and I started to play the action hero name game after a while when he was on screen. My best were Buff Hardchest, Quad Rockman, and Ron McMuscles, but while kind of boring and lifeless he wasn't the character that agitated me the most. That goes to Mason Weaver, the anti-war reporter. I found her character insufferable, the archetype non military character that challenges the system because she somehow knows better than everyone else. Of course she is right in the end which makes her even more obnoxious but some of her proposals are rather reprehensible. When the soldiers are trying to push westward against Hank's advice, they are doing so under the auspices of rescuing the stranded captain. Though the audience is already aware that he is dead, there is no way that any of them would be aware of this so by going against the system is tantamount to leaving a man behind. A man that has a child back home he was trying to get back to in time for their birthday. How none of the soldiers that they had shown to be close to him didn't punch her in the face for that I cannot imagine.
As a vehicle to set up an upcoming movie, I really liked this. It has some stupid decisions but they aren't as jarring as some movies. And I am thoroughly hyped for Godzilla vs Kong now. Its an interesting change of pace.