Kong: Skull Island (2017)

 

Kong: Skull Island taps into some of the existing mythology about King Kong. The primary setting is still Skull Island, a remote location in the South Pacific that is surrounded by storms that prevent it from being discovered and explored. However, this reboot (set in 1973 near the end of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War) places Kong in a somewhat different context by making him the protector of the island’s inhabitants from the really scary monsters that lie dormant beneath the surface. Of course, we don’t find this out immediately; first, Kong has to attack a series of helicopters that have been dropping seismic charges across the island, potentially awaking some of the aforementioned hidden monsters. Ostensibly, the expedition to Skull Island is intended to prove the existence of such monstrous creatures, and John Goodman’s Bill Randa is the head of the government agency looking for proof. He enlists Tom Hiddleston’s James Conrad, a former British Special Forces officer, a team of (mostly doomed) soldiers led by Samuel L. Jackson’s Col. Preston Packard, and a couple of seismologists. Oh, and Brie Larson’s Mason Weaver is a war photographer along for the ride because, well, all of the Kong movies provide at least one white woman for Kong to rescue. As you might expect, the survivors of the various helicopter crashes must meet up with each other and make the journey to a rendezvous point within three days, arbitrary deadlines always being necessary to increase the dramatic tension—will they make it in time? Packard, however, is initially obsessed with finding all of his men who might still be alive and then becomes obsessed (a la Ahab in Moby-Dick) with killing Kong in retaliation for his other men’s deaths. Viewers of this type of film could easily predict what will happen on this journey; the foreshadowing is pretty heavy-handed. Since the soldiers had been on their way home when Packard agrees that they will serve as the military escort, it’s no surprise that many of them die. When one of them writes a letter to his son and asks a fellow soldier to deliver it if something happens to him, you know what to expect. The plot offers relatively few surprises. John C. Reilly almost steals the movie as a World War II lieutenant who’s been stranded on the island for almost 29 years. He’s a bit crazy, understandably so given what he must have witnessed in three decades on Skull Island, but he serves as the voice of reason trying to prevent Jackson from trying to destroy Kong. The movie has a bit of fun with the others trying to catch Reilly’s Lt. Hank Marlow with world events since the end of World War II. (No, the Cubs still haven’t won a World Series, but we’ve put a man on the moon.) He also provides the escape boat used in the second half of the film, a vehicle that another character describes as looking “like it’s made out of pure tetanus.” What really makes a Kong movie a success is, of course, Kong himself, and he’s pretty impressive here. The visual effects are spectacular, whether he’s eating a giant squid like someone at a sushi place, helping Larson’s character free a trapped water buffalo, rescuing her from a particularly nasty Skullcrawler (as Reilly’s character dubs them), or battling a series of Skullcrawlers. Those beasts may only have two legs and a tail, but their mouths are frightening. The cinematography is beautiful, award-worthy in its own way, and the location scout for the film deserves a great deal of credit for finding such spectacular places (Hawaii, Australia, Vietnam) for the action to take place.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Visual Effects