Kong: Skull Island - Pretty People Running from Scary Monsters

Rating: 7/10 (30 November 2018)

Last week, I finally sat down to watch Kong: Skull Island - a two-hour ride with a lot of cool monsters and a lot of missed opportunities.
Screen Crush tells us that there have been seven King Kong movies (not counting the rip-offs), making Kong: Skull Island the eighth installment in the franchise. There are elements in this movie that are universal to all King Kong movies, but it still manages to stand on its own in this very diverse (at least quality-wise) franchise.
Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Kong: Skull Island stars Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson. In supporting roles we see Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Riley, John Goodman, as well as many, many others.
In this re-telling of the King Kong story, the expedition to Skull Island is led by a government agent Bill Randa, played by John Goodman. The official objective is to prove the so-called Hollow Earth theory, but what Randa actually wants is to prove the existence of monsters that once ruled the Earth.
Randa, together with seismologist Houston Brooks and biologist San Lin, recruits an expert tracker James Conrad, played by the de-Lokified Tom Hiddleston.
Since this is a government operation, the team is escorted by Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard, played by Sam Jackson who's giving a wonderfully over-the-top performance. Preston and his men are about to end their tour in Vietnam, but Preston is more than happy to go on one last mission, much to the rest of the soldiers' chagrin.
The last to join this ragtag team of lovable misfits is Brie Larson's anti-war photographer Mason Weaver. Just like Randa, Weaver keeps her true intentions to herself, as she believes this expedition to be a covert military operation, one she is set on exposing.
They arrive at Skull Island, marvelling at the untamed beauty of it, but when they drop the explosives to map out the island, the explosions attract King Kong himself. He kills most of the team, with survivors getting split in two groups, separated by square miles of hostile jungle, and now we have our movie.
Kong: Skull Island takes place in 1973. The decision to make this movie a period piece had to with the film's place in the Monster Universe that Legendary Pictures set up with 2014's Godzilla. Studio decisions aside, this could have been a thematic decision as well.
1973 is the end of an era; a time of great disillusionment in the US. The times are unstable; the general mood is one of war-weariness and disappointment, and our characters are supposed to reflect this collective state of mind.
Sam Jackson's character is by far the best one to capture this disillusionment. Jackson describes him as Ahab, and the similarities are everything but subtle. He is the Ahab of this movie, but his quest for revenge against Kong is very-well motivated. He is a soldier who's about to go home for good. His war is over, and he plunges into this new mission head-first, desperate to give his life meaning again. It's his own selfish desires that get his men killed. So, here you have a good conflict, a good way to drive an already unstable character off the deep end. He sees Kong as the enemy and treats the expedition as a military operation.
I wish the other members of this star-studded team were as fun to watch as Sam Jackson, which is a real bummer, considering the talent that has been jammed into this flick. The exception here is John C. Riley, who plays a soldier who's been stranded on Skull Island since WWII. He provides the comedy, and is an overall warm presence in this movie.
Tom Hiddleston is insanely attractive as the leading man, and Brie Larson is very beautiful. Their characters have potential, him as the disillusioned former military, and her as the war-weary photo-journalist. I say potential, because initially, their characters were supposed to have more meat on them.
For instance, Dan Gilroy, who was one of the screenwriters, wanted Larson's character to be more jaded so that her "emotional awakening" after meeting Kong would be a bigger deal. Instead, she starts off as a righteous anti-war journalist determined to expose the government, and she stays that way until the end. Her emotional connection to Kong doesn't change anything, it just makes her motivation stronger.
What I'm trying to say is that there was potential here to go deeper, to have the characters undergo some fundamental changes, but even with the cast as talented as this one, Kong: Skull Island still ends up being a movie about pretty people running from scary monsters.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a monster flick - its first priority is to be entertaining. Okay, its first priority is to make money at the box office, which it did, so everyone's a winner.
Watching Kong: Skull Island made me think about how little monster movies have changed since 1933 brought us the original King Kong. They have become increasingly more progressive (read: politically correct), and we can't even compare production values and visual effects (though, the '33 Kong still looks pretty dope), but even eighty years later, the core of these movies remains the same: here's a beautiful breeding pair; here are some scary monsters. Now watch them run around for a couple of hours. Why try to change something that works, right?
Still, I wish Kong: Skull Island had been more than just an enjoyable treat. Like I said, the potential was there. Take San Lin, played by actress Jing Tian, for instance. Initially, she was going to have more screen-time and be a - how should I put it? - a real person. I don't know who's idea it was to cut her role down to just a couple of lines of dialogue, but it's this kind of decisions that make the difference between a great movie and a movie that's just entertaining.
John Gatins, writer of the second draft of the script cited Apocalypse Now as a major inspiration for Kong: Skull Island, and it shows. This movie borrows heavily not just from Apocalypse Now but from other war movies, like Platoon, so much so that at times Kong: Skull Island looks more like a war movie than an adventure movie.
But the main parallel you can draw between this monster movie and the war movies it was inspired by is the general idea of the heroes venturing into the unknown land to smite the enemy only to realize that the situation is far more complicated.
Despite its many, many flaws, Kong: Skull Island is a very fun movie. It's a very kind-hearted movie with some very positive themes. There is an anti-war sentiment; but the movie also rests on a general idea that people are good. There is a nice scene at the indigenous people's village where Larson takes pictures of these people and bonds with them. It's supposed to be a growing moment for her character and maybe it's a little manipulative. Still, it's a warm little scene and the movie is better for it.
So, these were my two cents on Kong: Skull Island. I'm glad I watched this movie, but I'm also glad I didn't have to pay full price for it.