Kong: Skull Island

Recommendation: YES

Summary: Japanese and American World War 2 pilots crashland on a beach and promptly resume trying to kill each other until they are rudely interrupted by a living, breathing challenge to their sense of significance. Flash forward to the end of the Vietnam War and a ragtag team of scientists, a mercenary, a photojournalist, and disgruntled soldiers take part in a “geologic survey” of an unexplored island. Things go wrong.

Would you take this moment to once again welcome King Kong, grandpappy of the American movie monsters, to the cutting edge of trends in big budget Western film making. In this case, the cutting edge is not the bloat and operatic excess of Peter Jackson’s 2005 entry, nor the mind blowing technical wizardry of the 1933 original. No, in this case it’s the trend of plucking up unproven indie film makers with one or two tiny movies under their belt and unmaking their individuality in the fires of Hollywood. Double points for Kong: Skull Island being an entry in one of the very many shared cinematic universe exercises (see Marvel, DC, the Universal Monsters, to an extent Star Wars, and now Transformers?). But I’ll be damned if this film didn’t manage to sneak a bit of persinality in with its monster meyham, much in kind with Gareth Edwards’ Franchise-mate Godzilla (2014). I can’t rightly say whether it’s capital G good or not, but its a heck of a lot more than what the tepid Jurassic World could muster.

So, personality, eh? While Godzilla ’14 was a more slow paced (though some would say glacial), Spielbergian movie with a clear affection for its monsters and a tremendous sense of scale, Kong: Skull Island is tontent to be this weird little pastiche of Vietnam War movies, adventure/monster pictures, and exploitation cinema. There aren’t many PG-13 studio tentpoles that visually evoking something else involving a pole from Cannibal Holocaust. And it’s this “deplorable excess of personality,” to quote a Spielberg film that both Kong and Godzilla quote, that keeps Kong: Skull Island interesting long after its stand out first set piece with Kong.

It is worth noting that muck like Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island is sparing win its use of its titular beast. However, they differ in that Kong: Skull Island reveals its hand early (King Kong is on screen within the first 5 or so minutes) and its forward momentum. The film is littered with little bits of action that serve to make Skull Island itself an antagonist of sorts. It may come across as episodic at times given its poor human drama, but there is always some sort of threat around the corner as our hapless human cast come face to face with some unpleasant mega fauna. Credit where credit is due, there is a consideration and care put into the creature design that suggests a working ecosystem that is often missing in films that focus on making eerything look as “cool” or deadly as possible.

This does mean that for stretches it feels like the film is more interested in the way in which the environment conspires against the humans than the humans themselves. Outside of the broadest of strokes, this is true. There is an element of political subtext about the villification of soldiers by the media and the US government’s failure to be serious about the fate of its veterans. Every now and then there are flashes of the characters presenting with PTSD. And once in a while, the film comes close to being a genre film take on teh Vietnam War in the vein of Aliens, with low tech enemies ambushing and overwhelming a high tech military detachment.

And then Kong: Skull Island decides to go off and kill off its cast in sudden, gruesome ways, with no comment other than that it is possibly amusing that this moment that would be big in any other movie was totally deflated by a subversion showing the pointlessness of it all.

Having had time to dwell on the film, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is as successful at being a “Post-Human” blockbuster as Godzilla, but through different means. While Godzilla focused its attention on the monsters and impressed with its excellent sense of scale, making the human characters feel like insignificant lookers on, Kong: Skull Island never quite masters scale in much the same way. Aside from an early bout between Kong and helicopters, it is rather hard to get a read on how large the beasties are in comparison to the humans. No, Kong: Skull Island is post-human by virtue of its constant winking insistence that at best, humans are a minor annoyance, and at worst, their actions are pitiful and utterly meaningless.

As I said, I can’t tell if all of this is a “good” thing or not, but I can say that it’s fucking weird and commits to its weirdness as much as a franchise picture directed by a relative unknown can. At least much more than, for example, the half-assed satire of Jurassic World, or the defanged Robocop remake. And I’d take fucking weird over polished blandkess any day.

If it continues apace, the MonsterVerse will be one to watch; and the news of the attachment of Michael Dougherty to 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters has me very hopeful indeed.