74 years since its release, the original King Kong has been the key template for every subsequent giant monster movie of note, and (uneventful first act notwithstanding) remains a blistering adventure spectacle which holds up to this day. Of course, Kong: Skull Island has the shadows of two rather more recent movies hanging over it in Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong remake, and the aforementioned 2014 Godzilla, and it reacts against these in striking and largely effective ways. Where both the 2005 and 2014 movies really drew things out, with a good hour of build-up before the titular monsters are revealed, this time around the main attraction shows up before the opening sequence is over; and where Jackson and Edwards put a perhaps excessive emphasis on the human element with abundant character-based dialogue sequences, Vogt-Roberts plays things a bit more minimal, establishing the key players with short scenes then getting straight to what we really came to see. It’s interesting to see that this approach seems to have backfired in some quarters, with many criticising the characters as two-dimensional and lifeless, yet it’s easy to see why Warners and Legendary would consider this a preferable approach given how much stick their Godzilla got for the opposite reasons. (Damned if you do, damned if you don’t?)
Even so, the sheer number of characters in Kong: Skull Island is perhaps a little excessive. On top of the aforementioned leads we have a whole bunch of soldiers and scientists, and a further core character in John C Reilly as a weathered pilot who’s been trapped on the island since the late days of World War 2 – leaving him with both a wealth of Kong-based knowledge and an understandably odd temprament. Given this leaves Reilly on both exposition and comic relief duties, it’s hardly surprising this means he largely walks away with the movie, but he isn’t without some competition from Sam Jackson in one of the best bad guy roles he’s had for some time, replete with plenty of his signature quasi-Biblical speeches evoking his best-loved work (even his classic Jurassic Park catchphrase pops up at one point). Unfortunately the other leads don’t fare quite so well. Despite his top billing and the fact that he may as well have the words ‘dear Barbara Broccoli, please cast me as the next James Bond’ written across his skin-tight T-shirt, Tom Hiddleston winds up a bit of a fifth wheel in proceedings, not doing a great deal to move the narrative along. The same is sadly also true of John Goodman’s scientist, who fades into the background somewhat once they reach the island; and as for Brie Larson, she doesn’t have much to do but run around with extremely wide eyes.
On which note, damned if they haven’t given us a hero worth cheering for here. As brought to life by mo-cap actor Terry Notary, this is Kong at his most bad-ass, and whether it’s fighting off army helicopters, wrestling with a giant squid or trading blows with his main adversaries the Skull-Crawlers, it’s never anything less than a riveting spectacle. I won’t deny part of me was disappointed there weren’t any dinosaurs for him to fight this time around, but with Jackson’s remake being relatively fresh in the memory and Jurassic World even fresher, dino-bashing is pretty well-trodden territory these days, so it makes sense that some new monsters be brought in – and happily, the skull-crawlers are much cooler and nastier than Godzilla’s MUTOs.
It’s interesting to note how polarizing Kong: Skull Island is proving to be, seemingly leaving almost no one on middle ground. Much of the criticism carries weight – again, it is indeed flimsily plotted, with undeveloped characters – but how many enduring blockbuster favourites could we say much the same of? This is a film that does pretty much everything we might ask a monster movie to do, and it deserves to be watched on a great big screen with booming speakers and a big old popcorn and cola to hand. Then, as shouldn’t come as too great a surprise these days, the final post-credits scene points toward further movies with more much-loved kaiju entering the fray. Once again, we could look upon this as nothing more than a cynical money-making move; or we could just get in the spirit of things and look forward to yet more giant monster fun. And I know which camp I’m in.