Kong is back in a glorious gorilla thriller
Kong: Skull Island
12A cert, 118 min
Dir Jordan Vogt-Roberts Starring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Toby Kebbell, Jing Tian, John Goodman, John C Reilly
If war makes monsters of us all,
Kong: Skull Island is a creature feature twice over. It’s 1973, in the twilight days of the Vietnam war. The White House is encircled by protesters, and the Watergate scandal hasn’t even hit its stride. Monsters always mean things: the original Godzilla was subjugation under the A-bomb blast, the Cloverfield mega-crustacean, raw panic in the face of 21st-century terror. This Kong, who kebabs military hardware on palm trees, is humiliation on the world stage writ large – 100ft large, to be exact. No world power likes to be made a monkey of, but especially by… well, you know.
“Mark my words, there’ll never be a more screwed-up time in Washington,” says Bill Randa (John Goodman). As a senior member of a mysterious task force, Randa suggests the US needs an easy victory somewhere to shore up its global standing. So he assembles a team for a resource-stripping mission to a strange land mass called Skull Island, recently discovered by a spy satellite.
The hit squad is made up of government officials, a military detail (led by Samuel L Jackson’s Lt Col Packard), plus a tracker (Tom Hiddleston), a photojournalist (Brie Larson) and various science types.
Kong: Skull Island is the seventh official remake of, or sequel to, the original King Kong released in 1933, but the first that could have been pitched as a loopy, audacious B-movie riff on Apocalypse Now. It’s evidently been made on the understanding that merely unveiling an enormous primate isn’t much cause for excitement in itself – even if the new breed is four times taller than the Empire State-climbing original. So Kong himself is brought on almost immediately, and from that point every moment of potential awe comes doubly turbo-charged with laughter and shock. A large part of the enjoyment comes down to the sheer earth-shaking lunacy of Kong’s daily grind, even before the human intruders are factored in. Without giving away any specifics of the prizefights in store, let’s just say he’s just one member of a lively ecosystem.
The carnage is flamboyant past the point of cartoonishness, but it’s also frequently outrageous in a way you’re never quite steeled for. Skull Island’s director is Jordan Vogt-Roberts, whose coming-of-age comedy The Kings of Summer had the same bone-dry sense of humour. This is only his second film, but it’s characterful and accomplished.
No members of the ensemble cast could be described as indispensable, but that’s because many of them are specifically there to be dispensed with. Larson’s character is far closer to Lara Croft than a Fay Wray scream queen, carrying a leather-holstered 35mm camera. Skull Island has a fetishy soft spot for analogue technology, which is reflected in its flat-out ravishing look, which mixes deep, swoony Ektachrome colours with electrifying up-to-themoment action staging. In truth, the whole film is a kind of eccentric retro-artefact with fun at the forefront of its mind: less Heart of Darkness than darkness with heart.