Kong: Skull Island

Gorilla My Fever-Dreams
or
Monkey-See, Monkey-Poo

It's hard to know whether Kong: Skull Island is a monster movie or a comedy. The team that put together the new film version of Godzilla (minus Gareth Edwards, who moved on to the Star Wars franchise) have whipped together a reboot of King Kong—I have no idea how many Kongs this is now, but it rivals the number of kongs my dog went through in his life.

That confusion might be due to the influence of writer Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawlers, The Bourne Legacy—the non-Damon one), who might have taken on this assignment to fund one of his own more personal projects...and didn't quite have the wherewithal to take it too seriously. Peter Jackson, who was obsessed with the original, did his own elephantine version of King Kong some years back (he suggested Guillermo del Toro direct the new one), but this version has little to nothing to do with that one. For one thing, the Kong in this one is monstrously huge, freakishly taller than Jackson's. And, as any re-boot will do, they start afresh, as if nothing before it had happened.

Everything, that is, except Apocalypse Now.

After a prelude which sets up a character's back-story and feels a bit like John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific, we cut to the story's main time-line. It is 1973 and President Nixon has announced the end of the Vietnam war. Troops are headed home. But Nature apparently abhors a military vacuum. Driving into Washington D.C. is Bill Randa (John Goodman) and geologist Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) who are in town for a terse and not-too-welcome meeting with Senator Willis (Richard Jenkins) seeking a grant to explore a hither-to unknown piece of landscape, Skull Island. Randa badgers the Senator into getting the funds, but, before he leaves, one more thing...he'd like a military escort.

Cut to the Sky Devils Squadron, in the process of rotating stateside when a phone-call comes to Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) with a new assignment—chopper Randa and his crew to Skull Island. Randa and Brooks, meanwhile, are recruiting: they hire James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston)—Conrad (nyuk, nyuk*)—a former Captain of the British Air Services as a tracker; photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson); and Landsat employees, geologist San Lin (Tian Jing), Victor Nieves (John Ortiz) and Steve (Marc Evan Jackson)—you know that when a character doesn't have a last name, they're not going to have a lot of screen-time.

The odd mix of scientists and Air-Cav take a ship to Skull Island and launch a reccy with Huey's over the seemingly deserted island. But, sometimes, all it takes is one...."I-is that a monkey?" says one of the pilots. And then, all Hell breaks loose.

Usually, in a "King Kong" movie, they save the air-vehicle swatting for the finale, but, here, it's the opening act as Kong dispatches the Huey's like so many annoying mosquitoes. Machines get knocked out of the sky with extreme prejudice, or, in a phrase that will come up later, "no conscience." The surviving parties are scattered across the terrain, enough to create two sides: the military and the scientific. The scientific respond with an alarmed "what the Hell was that?" The military respond with an alarmed "whatever the Hell that was, let's kill it." Col. Packard is pissed that too many of his guys have bought it from the monkey-menace and he confronts Randa about what they're doing there.

"Monsters exist." says Randa.

"No shit," says the unimpressed Packard.

Randa tells him that he has a history with a monster, but the world has considered him a crack-pot despite his being the only survivor of an encounter. This little sortie has had a purpose beyond geology—to provide proof for his group MONARCH, in the business of finding Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, or MUTO's. Where have we heard that term before? Godzilla. "This planet doesn't belong to us." says Randa. "Ancient species owned this Earth long before mankind, and if we keep our heads buried in the sand they will take it back."

Sounds like Packard is on the same page, but a few chapters behind. Randa thinks the Earth is hollow with all manner of unmannerly critters hidden inside and that we need a coordinated plan to deal with it all. Packard is not so forward-thinking. He's got men dead who should have been with their families instead of dealing with these monkey-shines, and he's going to take the primate down with whatever weaponry he can salvage from the downed choppers. But, as the movie has a ways to go, the Monarchs and the Sky Devils split up for a rendezvous point downriver where the scheduled pick-up is going to occur, giving the Monarch team to get into a bunch of mis-adventures and set-pieces.

The best of these takes place in a smokey boneyard, where there is evidence of the carcasses of other Kong's and creatures littered across the landscape. The air is shrouded with a thick sickly-green mist...all the better for beasties to come lurching forward into sudden view in 3-D to make patrons jump out of their seats...as both are wont to do. 

Skull Island has a bunch of weird creatures, odd enough you might see a Del Toro influence...either that, or the design staff kinda gave up. Sure, there's a skyscraper-tall spider (that's rather interesting), but there's also a thing called a Skull Crawler ("I never said that name out loud before, it sounds stupid now that I think about it. You call them whatever you want.") that's basically a big lizard that wears its bones on the outside. Then there's a monster that just appears nameless that resembles a walking tree-trunk. Okay, they saved some design-money there.

The puny humans do their best to hold things off, and then Kong stomps in and whups on them—that's the pattern for all the Kong movies since Merian C. Cooper directed the first one in 1933. But, again, the Del Toro influence is evident because a lot of the battle moves are straight out of Pacific Rim.

The director is one Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who has been mostly directing TV, but has one feature in his resume, 2013's The Kings of Summer, which is as far away from this as one could get. Vogt-Roberts has a rather straight-forward style, more dependent on art direction than direction, encourages comedy in the performance of the actors (except for his leads) and he has one odd quirk: he seems to be a techno-fetishist. No one can turn on a piece of equipment or flip a switch on anything electronic without it getting its own cutaway shot, a move that tends to halt the momentum of the story, and, after awhile, gets annoying. One wonders what the motivation for this is—it certainly isn't to enhance the story-telling.

"Ack!"

Entertaining, it is, if kinda dumb, and the Apocalypse connection is, simultaneously, inspired and derivative, exchanging Marlon Brando for a gorilla (at least the gorilla isn't babbling pretentiously). But, one quibbles at one's own risk when you face the fact that it's a movie about a flippin' giant monkey. One can't get too high-brow about this as the bar is so low. Instead, one should just be glad there's a spark of life in the thing—something you can't say about John Guillermin's 1976 version...or, most of them, for that matter. Previously, Kong movies were merely a showcase for technical FX advancements in the art of illusion. Now, in the CGI-verse, everything is on the same level pixelated playing field. We want more from our King. It will be interesting to see what they do with these things—a post-credit sequence promises a Godzilla/Kong mash-up (with hints of Mothra, Ghidrah (the three-headed monster), and Rodan). 

Thank God(zilla) they're not taking these things too seriously. That means I don't, either. Pass the banana-flavored popcorn.

"This is the end...."

* "Conrad" refers back to author Joseph Conrad, who wrote "Heart of Darkness" on which Apocalypse Now is based. Another character is named "Marlow" after the story's protagonist.

The producers promise a sequel of King Kong v. Godzilla.