Warner Bros. waste no time trying to imply their King Kong is the baddest Kong yet, as the production logos fly across the screen to the sound of airplanes firing machine guns. The outcome isn’t what you might expect: two World War II planes shoot each other down, and the vintage aviators parachute to shore and safety, only to be promptly dominated by a giant ape larger than the one their predecessors took down over New York. Later in the movie, he’ll make pretty fast work of ’70s-era military helicopters not unlike the ones that once flew at another ancestor on the World Trade Center. Aircraft do not work on kaiju-sized Kong, and since his once and future foe Godzilla is basically bulletproof, consider this his Eye of the Tiger warm-up. Though actually it’s more like an Eye of Sauron, in a couple of extreme close-ups that seem to show a ring of fire around his pupil.
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts is no Gareth Edwards, and that’s a good thing: when he makes a monster movie, it’s almost non-stop monsters. Think of the creature features you liked as a kid, but with all the stuff you didn’t like taken out. This time, the monsters don’t all have to get killed, the hero isn’t some square-jawed stiff, and there are no kissing scenes. Humans are snuffed a lot, and Kong’s responsible for a fair amount of people-deaths, though we later learn it’s only in the service of good-of-the-many versus good-of-the-few-or-the-one calculation. You bring helicopters to his island and drop seismic charges that will awaken subterranean hellbeasts, and Kong’s going to have to take you down for the sake of all other life on Skull Island (which, in this movie, should technically be called Skull Archipelago, but nobody’s going to a film with that title).
Humans are here because the Monarch Group, last seen in the recent Godzilla movie, has been tracking the existence of giant monsters, without much success. Piggybacking on a satellite mapping mission, and gaining themselves a military escort by invoking Cold War paranoia, Fat Dude (John Goodman), Black Nerd (Corey Hawkins) and Token Utterly Useless Chinese Character For International Sales (Tian Jing) lead the expedition without telling anyone that here be monsters; also along for the ride are expert tracker Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and female photojournalist Captain Marvel (Brie Larson).
Leading the troops is Samuel L. Jackson (Samuel L. Jackson), who is so infuriated by both Kong’s smashing of helicopters and the fact that U.S. troops just pulled out of Vietnam that he’ll be damned if he lets another jungle conflict end in withdrawal or defeat. (Given the obvious metaphor, it’s amazing nobody makes a “Viet Kong” joke.) Warning him that this is a really bad idea is the local Convenient English-Speaking Exposition Guy (John C. Reilly), who was one of the original aviators in the opening, and has lived on the island/archipelago for 28 years among the magical native people who don’t speak.
There’s no need to spoil all of the creatures that lurk on the island, but amid a whole mess of visual nods to prior Kong movies, it’s good to see the octopus from the original King Kong vs. Godzilla get an update. Let’s just say Kong is no rookie in that fight…you might, in fact, call him an Oldboy. He’s also smarter than prior Kongs, and can fashion giant weapons out of things he finds. Smart enough to know he’s the last of his kind, too, which gives us the now-obligatory “Sad Kong” moment; seriously, the 1933 original only got sad when bleeding to death, but every filmmaker since has sought to sentimentalize the ape more and more. Thankfully, this marks a big step away from the lengths to which Peter Jackson took that aspect; just as Jon Favreau changed the ending of The Jungle Book because he always hated Mowgli leaving the jungle behind, Vogt-Roberts seems to have decided that “monkey die, everybody cry” need not be a hard and fast rule. And yes, I know gorillas aren’t monkeys. Dino De Laurentiis did not.
As you might have guessed from my casually dismissive character “names,” this is not a deep movie, nor one with a larger point to make. It is spectacle, and should be seen on the largest screen possible. I suspect it should be seen in 3D, too; my press screening was 2D, but there are several shots that feel like total in-your-face gimmicks, and may I say I have missed those, and am glad at least one director doesn’t feel above using them in his movie about giant beasts fighting to the death. This is not smart cinema, and it’s not trying to be; rather than a reinvention, it’s like a de-invention, back to the time of Destroy All Monsters.
Your inner child, if you still have one, should love it. Emphasis on the “if.”
