dvd review

AGROUP of soldiers and a spunky reporter (Brie Larson) head to a mysterious island where they find a giant ape. The story sounds familiar because writers Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly put together an uninspired script that includes all the same beats from past King Kong movies.

This one is a little different in that it takes place at the end of the Vietnam War. That would have been interesting if that time period selection had to do with big political issues of the era. That’s not the case. The time period was selected based on how the technology to map the world from space was just being developed. A kind of technological ignorance is necessary to offer an explanation of how a giant island at the centre of a neverending storm that is 160km across could go undetected for so long.

Director Jordan VogtRoberts keeps the movie going at a steady clip and takes the necessary pauses to stage some big fight scenes. But even the fights are uninspired. Compare the fight between Kong and a lizardlike creature to the fight sequence in the 2005 King Kong where the giant ape fought giant dinosaurs while caught up in a tangle of vines and you will see the weaknesses in the new offering. There’s nothing painfully wrong with

Kong: Skull Island. There’s nothing excitingly right either. That’s because the main reason this movie was made was to set up a battle between Kong and Godzilla, as the producers of Kong: Skull

Island were behind the 2014 Godzilla movie.