Kong: Skull Island

Hollywood truly has become an even stranger place. Who would have thought that the next film from Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the director of Kings of the Summer, a coming of age indie drama and Sundance darling, would be Kong: Skull Island, a bombastic, over-the-top, slightly stupid, franchise creature feature. As a mindlessly entertaining 2 hours of entertainment, the film is certainly serviceable. However, the action often comes across as ungrounded from reality, which clashes with its more serious tone in the dramatic bits, and the general vibe of the movie is kind of one note.

The movie is set just after America’s involvement in the Vietnam War comes to an end and features a ragtag crew of scientists, military escorts, a tracker, and a journalist exploring a secret island, cloaked in perpetual storm clouds, for a hideous monster one of the scientists is convinced must be there. That creature, of course, is King Kong… but not all is as it initially appears.

The movie is trying to bundle together a little bit of conspiracy narrative, a little bit of Vietnam War allegory, and a little bit of King Kong (1933) but only the bits before they leave the island. This mashup frequently doesn’t work. Once our crew makes it to the island, events end up splitting the group into those that wish to kill Kong and those that wish to keep him alive. The military, who by and large want him dead, are led by a commander with a chip on his shoulder after Vietnam who becomes single minded in his purpose. Interesting thematic material, to an extent, but the way it plays out is so bizarrely self serious in a movie that starts off with John Goodman convincing the government to continue to fund his ridiculous cryptozoology projects because “you wouldn’t want the Russians to find them first.” As for the King Kong but never leave the island idea, it attempts to find some familiar beats with the original, such as Kong’s affection for Brie Larson’s character mirroring that of the original’s affection for starlet Ann Darrow, but without the trip to New York and ensuing events, Kong: Skull Island never quite nails the drama and poignancy of the original’s ending.

The one place the film really surprised me was in its recontextualization of Vietnam War movie imagery and filmic language into the world of King Kong and Skull Island. There are so many cinematographic touches that reminded me of Apocalypse Now or Platoon in this movie about a giant monkey punching Lovecraftian horrors from beneath the earth right in their razor-toothed faces. Members of the stranded team make their way up a river, uncertain of what fresh hell awaits them, like it is a tributary of the Mekong delta. Shots fill with earthy haze, just like the helicopter beach landing from Coppola’s masterpiece. There is something both bizarre and compelling about a filmmaker borrowing the cinematic language of the masters that came before him and applying it to a goofy giant ape picture.

As vaguely clever and deftly actualized as this appropriation of the conflict aesthetic of the Vietnam War may be, that’s about all the movie does with it: use it as an aesthetic. Though some vague metaphorical connection may have been intended between the cocksure but underprepared U.S. led expedition finding themselves completely out gunned and out maneuvered by a native antagonist and the political and military mistakes of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese civil war, that connection is incredibly tenuous. Instead, the movie is basically just a visually and auditorily stimulating but ultimately kind of empty creature feature with a passable but fairly mediocre script. Some may, as a result, find the usage of the imagery of anti-war films for something so obviously commercial to be offensive; the director is fetishizing some aspect of a very real and very traumatic incident in American history rather than giving it the dramatic weight it deserves. Others may just find it baffling to graft such loaded visual language onto something so undeserving of its associations. Or, like me, you might simply be taken aback by the bold and unexpected nature of such a remix.

Would Recommend: If you like watching a giant monkey punching various objects and entities into tiny smithereens.

Would Not Recommend: If you consider anti-war cinema about Vietnam to be a particularly sacred thing.