Kong: Skull Island (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Tencent Pictures, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I ran a really peculiar movie with an odd production background: Kong: Skull Island, a 2017 production from Warner Bros. that was apparently conceived as the second film in a cycle they’re calling the “Monsterverse,” a mashup of the King Kong and Godzilla legends which apparently began with the 2014 Godzilla reboot directed by Gareth Edwards and followed up with this movie, then two sequelae: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021). Charles had actually wanted to rent Godzilla vs. Kong from a Redbox machine but couldn’t find one in working order, so I went on Amazon.com and found that the cheapest way to get Godzilla vs. Kong was by buying a three-disc Blu-Ray boxed set with Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters as well. Then I looked up the three films on imdb.com and found not only that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was not only a different film from the 2014 Godzilla (which I already had and which we’d pretty much put in the good-film-that-could-have-been-way-better category: for my review, see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/godzilla-warner-bros-legendary-pictures.html) but actually the third movie in the cycle, as well as a throwback to the original Japanese Godzilla cycle, particularly the film Son of Godzilla (1967), which posited an island out in the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific that supposedly had evaded discovery from airplanes and other modern means of detection where a number of Toho Studios’ copyrighted monsters hung out and either allied with or fought each other.

Kong: Skull Island was supposed to be the second in the series and involved MONARCH, a super-secret research organization, either part of the U.S. government or at least funded by it, which under the guise of doing weather observations set sail for the mysterious Skull Island. Like the legendary Bermuda Triangle (which is actually referenced in the dialogue), Skull Island is supposed to have been the graveyard of various ships, including a U.S. Navy destroyer in 1944 which was discovered as a derelict with only one survivor aboard: Bill Randa (John Goodman), who never forgot the experience of Skull Island and insisted on forming MONARCH and setting up an expedition to it to find the monsters that supposedly dwell there and document their existence. The government turns down Randa’s requests for the money and personnel he needs to find Skull Island – which supposedly is surrounded by a permanent storm system in the atmosphere, which is why it’s never been seen from the air or otherwise documented by the normal surveying means that have eliminated “previously unknown lands” as locales for stories – and mount his expedition. Then Randa can get his expedition going because the U.S. has just withdrawn from active combat operations in the Viet Nam War and therefore there are plenty of U.S. military personnel in that part of the world to fill out his mission and also lots of equipment, including the helicopters that fly them to the island from an aircraft carrier that takes them most of the way there. He recruits the usual motley crew for the expedition, including British soldier of fortune James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston, whom we saw again after the movie in clips from a Marvel Cinematic Universe production, Loki, on an episode of the Jimmy Kimmel Show in which Kimmel was interviewing his Loki co-star Owen Wilson) and war journalist and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson, who according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post took the role because she wanted to play an action figure as opposed to the nearly helpless victim she portrayed in her best-known film, Room), along with the military man in overall command, Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson – and Charles questioned his casting because he didn’t think there were that many African-Americans in positions of authority in the U.S. military at the time – 1973 – this film is set).

The copters that fly Randa’s company to Skull Island are almost immediately brought down by a huge (140-foot, about six times the size he was in the original 1933 film) Kong, a surprisingly flexible-looking giant ape considering his size, in a scene that almost seems like Kong getting a twisted sort of revenge on aircraft for having brought him down at the end of the 1933 film. From there the film turns into an oddball mashup of monster movie and war story; one imdb.com contributor mentioned that Warner Bros. copied the iconic copters-against-a-sunset image from the posters for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Viet Nam war epic Apocalypse Now – only that’s not all they copied. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts duplicated many of Coppola’s famous scenes, including one of the helicopter crew flying in with suitably “inspirational” music on the soundtrack during which I joked, “I guess using the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ would have been too obvious.” (Charles counter-joked that if they’d used the “Ride” the audience would have been expecting someone to say, “Kong don’t surf!”) The biggest problem with Kong: Skull Island is the almost total failure to maintain a sense of suspense and terror – the things the creators of the 1933 King Kong (directors Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack and their writer, Ruth Rose, who was also Mrs. Schoedsack) did so well. We get an awful lot of a rapidly diminishing number of military and quasi-military people slogging through the jungle and some exciting and occasionally terrifying monster-attack scenes (my favorite was the giant flying spider that can jettison its legs and send them flying through the air to impale its victims – the first human we see lose his life to this thing ends up with the leg embedded into his mouth that makes it look like he’s playing the world’s biggest and most malevolent didgeridoo) before a plot of sorts eventually emerges.

The film began with a prologue set in 1944 in which an American and a Japanese soldier were saved from another one of the island’s monsters by Kong. They swore a bond of friendship with each other and now, in 1973, the Japanese soldier is apparently dead of natural causes but the American, Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly, who steals the film once he’s introduced), is still there. Naturally the writers – John Gatkin, story; and Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, script – make a good deal of the culture shock a man who hadn’t seen or heard anything from the outside world for nearly 30 years would experience. He asks if the war was over, if the U.S. won, if the Chicago Cubs (he’s from Chicago originally) ever won a World Series, and what is the weird sort of music the other people on the expedition are playing and when and how it displaced swing. (He mentions being a fan of Benny Goodman while the modern-day crew are playing a portable phonograph – a neat way of introducing music of the era without just plunking it onto the soundtrack the way Coppola did in Apocalypse Now – and listening to David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” I resented that a little because I personally like both Benny Goodman and David Bowie, just as I resented it a bit when the 1943 film Reveille with Beverly set up an opposition between classical music and swing, when I was sure that even in 1943 there were people who liked both.) Marlow has built a weird sort of watercraft scavenged from parts of wrecked planes, and he offers it to the expedition members as their only hope to get away from the monster-ridden parts of the island to the shore were a Navy ship is supposed to pick them up in exactly three days – and when we saw this boat in action on the water I joked, “Now it’s The African Queen.”

Marlow has also befriended a native tribe – yes, there are indigenous humans on Skull Island, just as there were in the 1933 King Kong – and there’s even a wall across the island, though it’s built not to keep Kong out but to ward off the really terrible monsters who live inside the earth and periodically emerge to consume whatever life forms they can get their hands, claws, beaks and teeth on. The nastiest one of these is a species called the “Skullcrawlers,” who when they first appear look innocuous enough – like naturally-existing green lizards scaled up to giant size – but turn out to be malevolent predators that, among other people on their diet, abruptly eat John Goodman. Director Vogt-Roberts clearly knows his way around a monster action scene but he has little sense of pace; the movie is just a dull slog through the jungle that occasionally cuts in a monster sequence. There are a few brief references to the original King Kong – notably a battle scene in which Kong lovingly cradles Mason Weaver in his left hand while using the other hand to fight off a nasty monster – and some in-joke references (notably the character names “Marlow” and “Conrad”) to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the original story source for Apocalypse Now. (The “explorer” character in Heart of Darkness was called “Marlow” in Conrad’s novel, but was changed to “Willard” in Apocalypse Now.) There are also some predictable anachronisms in the film, including terms like “embedded” and “deploy” that wouldn’t have been used in 1973, at least not to mean the same things they do now. And of course the writers couldn’t resist having all those big macho guys react with surprise and shock when Brie Larson’s characer shows up and they exclaim, “You’re a woman!” – a sexist gag I would have thought we’d outgrown by 2017.

Both Charles and I had the feeling that there was a much better movie possible from the basic plot and situations of Kong: Skull Island than the one that actually got made, and I was amused to find an imdb.com “Trivia” item that indicated director Vogt-Roberts had some of the same problems with it we had: “Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts co-wrote and appeared in the Honest Trailers of his own movie, highlighting some legitimate flaws with the film, such as massive (in his own words) structural problems, lack of character arcs for most of the human cast, and the fact that there are too many human characters to begin with. However, he still stood by the film and attacked the video made on the film by CinemaSins shortly before Honest Trailers was released. He also spent some time on Twitter attacking CinemaSins for their video on the film, calling them trolls and countering some specific sins.” Part of the problem with this film is not only did it have four separate writers, one for the story and three for the script, but the script writers’ credits on screen are linked with the word “and” instead of an ampersand – which is Writers’ Guild of America-speak to indicate that instead of working together as collaborators, each new writer took over from his predecessor. The result was a jumble of motivations and “takes” on the various characters, which was probably reflected in the rainbow of paper colors the scripts the actors worked from were printed on. The Writers’ Guild requires that each new writer or writing team assigned to a project must write on a different color paper from his, her or their predecessors so the Guild can later figure out who wrote what and therefore who contributed enough to a script to merit screen credit. One reason Hilary Swank accepted her role in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby was, she said in an interview, that when the script came to her it was entirely on white paper – which told her that there had been only one writer on the film, Paul Haggis, and therefore she wouldn’t have to figure out how to integrate different writers’ conceptions of her character into her performance. Obviously the people who acted in Kong: Skull Island didn’t have that luxury!