When the Monkey Doesn’t Die, People More Tickets Will Buy
Kong: Skull Island / directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
I guess there’s something oddly audacious in making a remake of one of the most influential films of all time, but simply doing it as an unabashed popcorn flick. In its limited ambition, Kong: Skull Island takes us on a weird ride that seems to only go through the motions of trying to make us care about what happens. Truly, the only character who you mind lives or dies is Kong, which I’m guessing was not the conscious intention — but that’s what happens when the human characters are a grab-bag of cliches, non-entities, and after-thoughts. It’s almost like they just included too darned many actors, and couldn’t figure out what to do with them. There’s a scientist guy who seems called out just enough to make you think he’s going to be significant in some way — but no. Ditto with a female researcher who seems more or less along for the ride. This is all the more noticeable in that it’s chock full of good or great actors — John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel Jackson, John C. Reilly — who are either miscast (Hiddleston, Larson) or forced to speak lines from a script (all of them) that, if there were an Academy Award for non sequiturs, boy would it win!
It’s 1973, the end of the Vietnam War is nigh, and explorer Bill Randa (Goodman) and his colleague (Corey Hopkins) persuade a U.S. senator (Richard Jenkins) to support an expedition to an island long-rumored and only recently charted (via the use of new-fangled satellite technology); whatever mysterious things might be there, they say, it’s better that we beat the Russians to them. The pair proceed to recruit a brooding air cavalry officer (Jackson) and his men for security; a war photographer (Larson) for posterity; and a dashing former British SAS soldier (Hiddleston) for kicks.
Randa clearly has a hidden agenda, but there’s no real sense of menace or danger around this mission — that’s left to suddenly be evoked by the special effects when the expedition arrives: they depict an unseen island surrounded by an unearthly barrier of howlingly fierce storm clouds and red lightning. And with the foregrounding of Jackson’s war-loving colonel (we are told in various ways that he believes the U.S. should not have left Vietnam) in the early action, the group’s arrival on the island is presented as a sort of commentary on militant imperialism — hammered home by the delight with which Jackson’s helicopter fleet drops bombs on the island, supposedly in an effort to map its geology (which explanation turns out to be both true and not). So when a gigantic ape appears out of the blue and proceeds to thrash the airborne armada with extreme prejudice and creativity (palm trees thrown as projectiles, buzzing choppers hopped over in a single bound) — well, you sort of end up rooting for the ape.
As the scattered human survivors make their way through this land that time forgot towards an elusive rendezvous point, the lack of care in drawing their characters sustains the sympathy deficit, so that their encounters with eerie creatures and other challenges are devoid of tension: if everyone’s sort of expendable, who cares what happens? But the film acts as if some great weight needs to be lifted, and so introduces the absurdly comic character of Hank Marlow (Reilly), a WWII pilot shot down over the island who’s been living there ever since. Whether by accident or design, Reilly adds most of movie’s zing not provided by the CGI ape, shaping what could have been ridiculous lines into delightfully surreal ones: when he’s on screen, it’s like you’ve suddenly been transported to a Kong-related Funny or Die skit.
Skull Island ends up executing a downsized, revised take on the Kong-female human relationship so central to the original King Kong and its major remakes. Out with the idea that Kong might find Larson’s war photographer sexually appealing; in with the notion that he appreciates her displays of compassion and moxie. He respects her boundaries; he thinks they should keep it platonic.
After all my kvetsching, it may come as a surprise when I say that the film is saved from disaster by the action scenes involving Kong and his various antagonists on the island: a giant squid; the U.S. army; and nefarious skull-crawlers (the skull-crawlers add a bit more zany pizazz to the story — they’re presented as emerging from another world below our own (hollow earth theory, anyone?) — and they help establish Kong’s significance as the island’s, and Earth’s, defender against these nasty killing machines). These sequences, particularly the ones involving other monsters, are a rare successful marriage of mass and speed that look like they’re actually present in the film’s world.
The other redeeming element of Skull Island is Kong himself: he garners our sympathies with his suffering and dignity, and this ape turns out to be more civilized than the supposedly civilized men who’ve intruded on his turf. His facial expressions are well done, and his cause is just. Kong bridges the world of animals and humans, and in doing so gives the film some depth and heart.
