MOVIE REVIEW – Eighty-four years after the first King Kong stomped onto screens, the huge ape is back, as the King of this very own isle. He’s pretty mad too: dumb humans (some of them straight from Vietnam, as the movie is set in 1973) are bombing and invading his home. This is the end, my only ape, the end? Not really…

 

If there’s a “Heart of Darkness”, then Kong Island is the very place. Yes, you guessed it right: Kong Island, set in 1973, at the end of the Vietnam war contains many references from both the movie Apocalypse Now and the novel, from which Coppola’s movie was made. Kong fights against an army of helicopters while standing against the setting sun a la Apocalypse and the main hero is named Conrad. Yet, Kong: Skull Island is a King Kong movie indeed…

Kong now

Besides the Apocalypse Now flavor, we also have a true King Kong story, one which is both doing justice to the old myth and still being more dynamic and somewhat more exciting. Kong is also a lot stronger here, and by that, I don’t only mean as a big strong ape, who destroys everything, but he doesn’t get so chained by his love for the “blonde woman” as in the former movies, he’s nobody’s sweetheart. Yes, there’s a blonde woman in this movie as well (in the person of Brie Larson, as the pretty photographer, Mason Weaver who tags along for the trip to Skull Island) and yes, there’s some “brief love interest” in the movie, but this is only another slight allusion to the older King Kong movies.

Kong is a strong and independent king of this island, where the human population is not only in awe of the huge ape, but also deeply thankful to him, as he is their savior against other, more deadly monsters. He is fierce and destroys and kills the new human invaders without regret, but he also protects the humans on the island. He’s, in fact, more like a god in the form of an ape, which is very much alive and takes care of demons threatening his isle and the population who worships him.

What happens on Skull Island, stays on Skull Island

Yet, in its jungle-stranded B-movie way, “Kong: Skull Island” is in fact closer in spirit to the wide-eyed amazement of the original than either of those remakes. That’s because it’s more casually willing to be its own thing. The 1933 version of “King Kong” is still definitive — the most awe-inspiring and emotionally transporting giant-monster movie ever made.

Part of the problem with both remakes is that they were straining to live up to what could never be equaled. “Skull Island” is more modest, but by staying on Skull Island and updating the place, it takes you somewhere you haven’t been.

A “King Kong” movie should be a fairy tale of primeval wonder in the first place, and happily, this one is. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts takes much of his insight from the very original Skull Island sequence of the first 1933 “King Kong,” with the huge dinosaurs, while you may also notice the influence of “The Mysterious Island,” the 1961 Ray Harryhausen classic that featured an eye-popping array of giant creatures.

In “Skull Island,” the island is packed with oversize species, from sad-eyed huge yaks to a giant stick-bug to swarms of blue-blooded pterodactyls to a towering spider that hovers over a forest to the octopus whose tentacles Kong battles and makes a snack of. The creatures keep the rather elemental story exciting; since we are never aware what we’re going to see next.

Expendables

No members of the ensemble cast could be described as indispensable, but that’s done on purpose: it’s because many of them are specifically there to be dispensed with. (Even Hiddleston, who gets star billing, could be easily chopped out of the plot without derailing it.)

Perhaps Larson’s character, who’s far closer to Lara Croft than a Fay Wray scream queen, is probably as close as any come to non-negotiable, and her leather-holstered 35mm camera is often pointedly contrasted with the firearms toted by other team members.

Of course, that also mean, is that the characters are paper-thin. Contrary to Apocalypse Now, from which it took its inspiration, there are no such complex characters like the ones play by Martin Sheen or Marlon Brando: Tom Hiddleston’s Conrad remains a boring hero, and Samuel L. Jackson plays a war-crazed G.I. Joe, without real meaningful purpose, he just wants to “kill Kong, to show that humanity prevails!”

The only truly interesting character is played by John C. Reilly, who plays a WWII pilot stuck on the island for thirty years. In fact, Reilly is so good, that he easily and by far the best character in the whole movie.

Still, it’s a pity that other characters are so paper-thin because we won’t care about them whether they die or live.

Popcorn Kong

Kong: Skull Island compares to an animated theme-park ride (valiantly, I must add). An exciting, Vietnam-era coaster enclosed by digital screens. From Kong’s hasty introduction, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts asserts his reboot with a mighty roar.

Perhaps the movie could benefit from a bit more care about the narrative and its main human characters. After all, we are “only human” as well…

-BadSector-