"Kong: Skull Island" contains enjoyable action scenes, but is lacking in characters

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2017)

A team has discovered an unknown island and was sent to that place to research it. But at arrival they entered the domain of Kong
Jordan Vogt-Roberts was the director of this film and he also wasn't really the problem of the film. Visually this film looks good, but that's also the best the film has to offer. The color grading was good enough and gave it a more vintage look and the cinematography overall was pretty good. The director had somewhat sense of scale, because he liked to put a human, as tiny as possible into the frame with Kong, who is ginormous in comparison to said human portrayed on screen. But that immediately brings me to one of the problems of the film: Kong. Well, how he looked at least, because even though he didn't visually look good, the scenes with him in them were the best that you can find in the film. Kong just looked very CGI to me, and he was the best looking CGI creature in the movie. This film is filled with moments in which the CGI is overwhelming. If they'd used more props, or went to location a bit more, this would've changed the movie quite a bit. Especially in the night scenes you could see that they were filmed in a set and that the backdrop consisted out of a green screen. And sometimes the film also goes into the ridiculous department with the CGI by showing the northern lights. Yes, the northern lights, you read that right. I know that they went on location numerous times, but some scenes then were shot in complete green rooms. Another aspect the movie failed at was the tone. It tried to be a drama, and action film, an over the top action film, a comedy, a serious film and all these things did not fit together at all. Often enough it tried to be taken seriously, when just unintentional funny stuff was going on, or it tried to be funny, when there was just nothing to laugh at.
The actors were just doing what the script was offering them, which is not a lot. The cast of this film is phenomenal, but underused. They have Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Toby Kebbell, Samuel Jackson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman The list goes on and on. All actors gave good performances, and were only likable due to their natural charisma. Samuel Jackson and John C. Reilly only managed to make their jokes work because of their on screen charisma. But some actors also had no chemistry together on screen and those were the little group of soldiers who were under Samuel Jackson's command. None of them felt like they liked each other and their relationship felt forced from the beginning.
The screenplay was the main problem with this film, because dear god, what did they do with the characters? Well, the characters that don't exist, because I've just watched two hours of hollow, empty, characterless human beings interact with each other, interchanged with some awesome scenes of Kong. But they had set up some things to create some interesting character, yet they completely forget about those things. In the beginning of the film for example we see Samuel Jackson's character with a bottle of alcohol, and he seems to be distant in the conversation he's having, which in my opinion insinuates the fact that he might be an alcoholic after the Vietnam War, but they never do anything with that set up character trait throughout the whole movie. The character of Toby Kebbell was given some character by having him write to his son, which practically made him together with John C. Reilly the most developed characters of them all, and the film has quite a lot of characters. John C. Reilly was stranded on the island for a very long time and we get to hear a bit about his past, but most of the time we get to re-hear what he has said before, so that really didn't add a lot to his character. Tom Hiddelston's character is just there to be cool, he's a tracker and that's pretty much all to his character. There's one scene where he talks about his past with Brie Larson, but that scene added very little to me caring for that character. There's also this ridiculous scene involving him in which he just asks for a sword and starts chopping things up, while magically having put on a gasmask with one hand, just to create one badass, senseless looking shot, which wasn't worth it at all. And if you want to know something more about Brie Larson's character: she's a photographer. The dialogue overall was just fine, there were some cheesy one liners, and bad jokes, but as a whole, it didn't achieve much.
In the end "Kong: Skull Island" wasn't a good movie at all, it was quite disappointing even. The acting was good and the action scenes were enjoyable, but the characters were lacking and the CGI wasn't the greatest. That's why this film gets just a 5.6/10.