I’m genuinely mad that no one demanded that I see Kong: Skull Island when it was playing in theaters. You failed me. If I had known there was a MonsterVerse, I would have been tempted to see this movie if only because I’m a completist. On the other hand, tying it to Godzilla (2014) would have made me think that it was crap, and I probably would have just seen it on home video. The real obstacle to seeing this movie is Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, which sucked all the joy out of the room and made everyone, including me, never want to see another Kong film again in my lifetime. The marketing leaned heavily on Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston’s fame, which with all due respect, at the time, was modest so people weren’t exactly clamoring to see them get together on screen, and I was wincing at the thought of Larson being put through the Hollywood machine to be reduced into a trope, the love interest. Gag!
Larson and Hiddleston are good actors so they are chameleons. At the time, before she became Captain Marvel, you saw Larson in a film because the story sounded great. I feared that they would turn her into the Smurfette in the film as the lone chick in the cast. Sure she wasn’t wearing that God awful, impractical white slip, but filmmakers have their ways, and everyone has bills. Now she is (hopefully) a brand name. Very few people are sadder than me that in spite of his fame playing Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hiddleston is not a better-known actor, and I think that the marketing was more focused on making him an action star or exploiting his fame, which with the benefit of hindsight, was a dreadful approach. You market Kong: Skull Island for what it is: Kong the way that you’ve never seen him before! It is like one of those awesome 70s movies with a remarkable ensemble cast that knows exactly which notes to hit, but doesn’t exactly fit any single genre. It has lots of inspirations and succeeds at making numerous cultural touchstone references without feeling derivative or getting weighed down by them.
Predominantly Kong: Skull Island is a war movie. Because Kong did not make an appearance until late in Jackson’s film, people have compared it to Jaws. Um, Jaws was good. Jaws has this amazing scene when one of the great white hunters tells his fellow hunters about the first time that he encountered sharks in World War II. It is a reference to the USS Indianapolis, and it is one of the most bone chilling scenes in the entire movie. Imagine that vibe throughout this entire movie, but it having differing effects on each character. War and facing your own mortality and finiteness within the universe becomes a Rorschach test. Do you use war to find meaning within your life by reducing every enormous reality to a problem that must be eliminated or are you comfortable with knowing your place in the grand scheme of things and accept/protect it? It is a beautiful theme that is successfully explored throughout the entire film. It adds humanity to the characters that could be seen as villains and heroism to the characters that could be seen as tropes. What the movie lacks in character development, it excels in terms of having confidence in the actors’ performances, not the clunky writing that we expect and tolerate in the Godzilla installments of the MonsterVerse, to allow them to depict their characters’ souls without being exposition mouthpieces.
Kong: Skull Island is the only MonsterVerse film in which the excellent cast actually has an opportunity to act. There is an early scene when Samuel L. Jackson is just sitting alone in his office then transforms when someone walks in with new orders. He gets a lot of moments later in the movie to ham it up and give his excellent one liners, but in that one quiet, still moment, he tells us everything that we need to know about his character’s entire life without uttering a single word. Boardwalk Empire’s Shea Whigham gets to bring his HBO staple of excellence to the big screen. John Goodman and Richard Jenkins provide gravitas early on, but the real heart of the movie is John C. Reilly, who provides comic relief and shows that his stints with Will Ferrell served him well, but also acts as the conscience of the film with his long-term perspective. I suppose that you can’t market a movie with Reilly as the star, but he is, and people need to stop taking him for granted. While Larson and Hiddleston deliver solid performances, their characters are less memorable than the unsung characters that were not trotted out to attract audiences.
More importantly Kong: Skull Island never forgets who the real star is: Kong! It has always irritated me that we are so human centric that we think that we would be interesting to anything that huge as anything other than a pet or a pest. The whole idea is absurd. Unlike Godzilla, Kong brings a tragic depth to the role that people project on to Godzilla, but never seems to fit. I haven’t rewatched the original or the first remake of King Kong, but Jackson’s film provides a back story that I don’t recall existing in the first two iterations of his story. The filmmakers were wise to retain that part of the story and discard everything else. Even though he isn’t called King Kong, he has the bearing of a regal ruler protecting and surveying his kingdom, weighed by the burden of his responsibility and judging the merits of each challenge and intervention more than most of his human counterparts. Some characters in the film call him amoral, but he had a thoughtfulness that indicated his age and wisdom. The first brilliant scene with him and Larson shows that he is ultimately on the side of the angels. I also personally appreciate that he doesn’t waste food and believes in leftovers. Nice touch!
I also adored the villains who were just as intelligent, but far more cunning than Kong. I asked myself if Guillermo del Toro had something to do with the villains’ design, but it was inspired by anime—nice. There is a tense, evocative sequence with a faulty flash in Kong: Skull Island that should be an iconic, unforgettable moment and should be studied in terms of pacing and evoking horror without showing anything. The film uses the trope of self-sacrifice and flips it on its head to show how genius these creatures are even in the face of advanced technology that they have never encountered before. It is such a brilliant moment that shows that these aren’t mindless creatures, but they understand strategy. Even Singer’s sequence in Jackson’s King Kong, though excellent, does not measure up to the denouement that is simultaneously a brief homage to the original and a potentially devastating blow to Kong. Jordan Voft-Roberts showed respect without losing momentum and stunted on these auteurs. I hope that he gets more work, especially since this film was his sophomore movie. What?!? His first film is already inexplicably in my queue. Excuse me while I move it up.
I hope that when Godzilla meets Kong, Voft-Roberts is part of the creative team because for the most part, I think that he nailed it with Kong: Skull Island. He definitely evoked the same joy in me that Pacific Rim did, but without losing the performances of some stellar actors. Thank you!