New spectacle roars into theatres
Oh, there will be popcorn — Kong: Skull Island is a rip-roaring, monstrously fun epic
In the realm of powerful-things-versus-other-things (Autobots/ Decepticons, Jaegers/sea monsters, Batman/Superman, etc.), only one battle really matters — will King Kong prove mightier than your wallet?
I’m guessing the answer will turn out to be yes. The newest Kong reboot is a rock ’em, sock ’em popcorn monster movie flick, featuring the biggest Hollywood ape to date. At a little over 31 metres (OK, 100 feet), Skull Island’s towering Kong makes Peter Jackson’s version from 2005 look like Donkey Kong. Junior!
Directed by relative unknown Jordan Vogt-Roberts (his 2013 feature debut The Kings of Summer was a sweet coming-of-age tale), Skull Island opens with a dramatic (and dramatically important) prologue in 1944, before moving the action forward to 1973. This not only gives it bragging rights over the 1976 remake (technically it’s first!), but also provides the perfect warweary, world-weary geopolitical backdrop.
The Vietnam conflict has just ground to a halt, and crackpot scientists Bill Randa and Houston Brooks (John Goodman and Corey Hawkins as a great, newfangled Abbott and Costello pairing) use the last drops of U.S. wartime military spending to charter a ride to an unexplored Pacific island, recently discovered by satellite.
Their military escort is headed up by Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson, doing what he does best) and a platoon of grunts right out of central casting. There’s the young guy who freaks out (Thomas Mann) and the older veteran with nerves of steel (Shea Whigham), who remarks after their first, violent, meeting with Kong: “That was an unconventional encounter.”
Goodman’s character has also hired tracker/mercenary/hunk James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) to make sure things don’t so south. And there’s a Life photographer, played by Brie Larson, who for the record screams exactly zero times during the movie. (That’s one fewer times than I did.)
Finally we have John C. Reilly as Captain Comic Relief (a.k.a. Hank Marlow), an airman who’s been in Kong’s realm since that opening prologue, 29 years ago. At least we know it’s possible to survive more than a few hours on Skull Island, although not all the new arrivals will be so lucky. (Also, good news: Reilly may seem overwhelming in the trailers, but he’s more bearable when spread out over the film’s two hours.)
Reilly’s character may be kooky, but it’s Lieut. Col. Packard who starts going a little Col. Kurtz during the mission. In fact, Skull Island is packed with references to Apocalypse Now, from the poster images to the helicopters-with-speakers trick, and a boat ride upriver to try to get out of Kong country, after he swats the choppers out of the sky like so many mosquitoes. The survivors’ cobbled-together watercraft is best described as a fighter-bomber, in that it’s made out of pieces of both.
Kong earns caveats in some markets, with some pretty gruesome violence. (As in other iterations of the Kong myth, the big ape isn’t the only scary thing on Skull Island.) And while there isn’t much of a love story, there are certainly enough human beats to make this more than just an exercise in computer-generated mayhem. There’s also some incredible attention to detail — the Washington and Saigon sets in the early scenes are beautifully crafted, and Larry Fong’s cinematography is stunning. (I was reminded of the glorious, Oscarnominated work in 2014’s Mr. Turner, a comparison I’m pretty sure you’ll find nowhere else.)
Even the 3D isn’t particularly annoying — and who doesn’t like a good Hitchcock/Vertigo zoom rendered in three dimensions?
Skull Island is more than just a monster movie, mind you: It’s also the opening salvo in Warner Bros.’ so-called Monster Verse, to be followed in two years by Godzilla: King of the Monsters and then a 2020 royal smackdown featuring the protagonists of both movies. Whether this franchise will lead to the diminishing returns seen in the Transformers movies or the Super/Batman battles remains to be seen. All we can say for sure is that it’s off to a rip-roaring start.