Jurassic Park meets Apocalypse Now in ape epic’s sweeping take on an old-school winning formula.
Misunderstood gorilla stays close to home — and tradition — in the latest iteration
The Wolverine sign-off Logan made bank last weekend by subverting superhero conventions, but Kong:
Skull Island doesn’t risk monkeying with its own durable legend.
It’s old school all the way for this baby, which even fetishizes the analog film/tape/rotary dial world of Watergate-era 1973 where most of the action takes place, following a prologue set near the end of the Second World War.
Kong is still the snarling softie he’s always been: a misunderstood lug who’s a sucker for a woman’s smile, as seen in multiple outings dating back to his 1933 film debut and including the 2005 “reimagining” by Peter Jackson. The puny humans who attack him in Kong: Skull
Island, propelled by Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising” and other classic rock ditties, are still as dumb as rocks — who flies a helicopter within grabbing distance of a growling furry behemoth?
They’re led by a particular bloodthirsty American warmonger, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who declares the Vietnam War wasn’t lost by the U.S. but rather “we abandoned it.” He’s actually scarier than Kong, as repeat eyeballs-to-eyeballs match cuts subliminally suggest.
And let’s resist the marketing tosh that the pro-environment backbeat of this flick is somehow a new idea. The don’t-mess-with-nature subtext has always been part of this saga — and also that of kissin’ cousin Godzilla, whose story is set to merge with Kong’s as part of the multi-studio revelry known as the MonsterVerse, which sounds like a new form of social media.
Yet sticking to tradition seems the right call for this movie because, seriously, would you want a really bloodthirsty King Kong? He’d mop up the humans in minutes and you’d be left with just an extended trailer.
This is a real Kong show, the one demanded by popcorn peddlers and munchers alike. There’s minimal boring dialogue and plenty of 3D blows-up-good action. The mild novelty of this movie, which is scripted by committee and directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts is that Kong stays put. He never leaves the South Pacific domain where he’s been living in relative peace. Skull Island is “a place where myth and science meets,” according to a government spook played by John Goodman, who sets in motion a covert operation to find out what’s really going down on this godforsaken rock.
The film becomes a combo Jurassic Park and Apocalypse Now as Goodman’s Bill Randa and Jackson’s Preston Packard convene for action with two other marquee characters — Tom Hiddleston’s ace tracker James Conrad and Brie Larson’s “anti-war photographer” Mason Weaver — along with a gaggle of military grunts.
There’s one other significant figure on the island: John C. Reilly’s Hank Marlow, a Second World War airman stranded there for 28 years, who long ago lost his bearings but not his fatalistic sense of humour.
“This is a good group of boys,” he tells the gang. “We’re all going to die together out here!”
He’s joshing around, kind of. They have a MonsterVerse to uphold!