Off My Shelf: Kong - Skull Island (2017)
The previews of Kong: Skull Island made it look like the sort of movie we would want to see for escapism -- something light and amusing, full of dumb action and special effects. A "popcorn movie."
Surprisingly, even with that low standard, it basically failed for me. Here's the trailer, so you know what we thought we were getting into:
It looked kind of fun, right? Well, here's the things that the movie got right: the CGI ape, the climax battle, and one visual of the "hero" running through a cloud of green smoke with a samurai sword. Now let's talk about everything else. (There are a lot of spoilers in here, so... you might want to watch the movie first, and then come back and see if you agree with me.)
THE CHARACTERS: For a start, a big problem with this movie was that there were just way too many characters. We had the male lead (Tom Hiddleston), the female lead (Brie Larson), the Samuel L. Jackson, the six to ten military guys he worked with, a random scientist, another random scientist, John Goodman, the two additional scientists, John C. Reilly, an entire village of natives...
This is only like half the people we're supposed to keep track of. Now, I understand that when you have a movie that means to feature people being killed in gruesome ways, you pad your film a bit with disposable people that you can easily kill off so that you don't run out of characters.
"Please beam down some more guys in
red shirts."But most of those "disposable" characters should be either, a) morally-suspect people...
Such as Kevin Bacon's "naughty teenager" in Friday the 13th......or b) people that you're never given enough info to care about. They don't have a name, they don't have a background. They just serve to alert us, the audience, that this is a dangerous situation. People who actually do have names and backgrounds might still die, but they need a more meaningful, substantive death. Not everybody has to have a monologue -- but if we know who you are, and feel for you in some way, there should be some significance to your death. It needs to make us feel something that has significance to the story.
It doesn't have to be an ornament-worthy moment, but, you know....Which is why it really surprised me (not in a good way) when they randomly kill off John Goodman's character halfway through the film. John Goodman's character is responsible for the story -- he personally instituted this mission to Skull Island, and it seemed like things ought to really revolve around him. Maybe, by the end, he's learned a lesson about the value of human life or the nature of nature or whatever? However, it's like the scriptwriters had no idea what else to do with him after a certain point... so he has barely any dialogue after they reach the island, then he's unexpectedly eaten by a dinosaur, and never spoken of again. (Not unlike the despicable treatment of Bryan Cranston in a certain other giant monster movie, that was supposed to star Bryan Cranston -- only to have him randomly die about fifteen minutes in from having stuff fall on him?)
I am still upset about that one. I should have asked for
my money back.Meanwhile, we have Samuel L. Jackson's character -- hamfisted "crazy military man", who becomes obsessed with the idea of killing Kong. My question for you is this: WHY ARE THE SAMUEL L. JACKSON CHARACTER AND THE JOHN GOODMAN CHARACTER SEPARATE CHARACTERS? John Goodman's character is shown as a bit loony to begin with, so why not just combine the two characters into one character who a) leads the mission to Skull Island for his own purposes, and b) those purposes turn out to be a goal of killing Kong, because he's CRAZY? Samuel L. Jackson had nothing to do until the end of the movie, and John Goodman had nothing to do after the beginning of the movie... so why not combine them?
I searched for a picture of John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson
together, and all the internet could give me was a picture of
sexy John Goodman. C'est la vie.Outside Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman... there were so many ridiculous ancillary characters that we had no time to get to know the people who were ostensibly our main characters, Tom Hiddleston and Cheese Larson. Tom Hiddleston is a "tracker", and Cheese is a war photographer who doesn't like the war. AND THAT'S IT. They have just the barest, merest, smattering of dialogue, and we don't ever get the chance to slightly care about them.
This is everything these characters do. You now have
no reason to see this movie.You know what? It's okay to have main characters who are ultimately not the main focus of the story, especially in this specific type of movie. That's fine! If you're like, "this is a special-effects movie and the real star is the giant monkey" -- that's fine!
But don't build up your human characters, then, as if you had something substantial to do with them later. Hiddleston is introduced like he's some kind of cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones... and his entire contribution to the movie is running fast and advising against adventuresome courses of action. Larson is introduced as if she's this hard-as-nails reporter who has strong moral convictions... and her main contribution to the movie is minor snark and not getting crushed when King Kong picks her up.
Not to beat this into the ground... but another thing this movie really missed was the "concerned scientist" character from all giant monster movies past -- "You can't blow him up! We need to study him... for science!"
This guy.There were like seven scientist characters in this movie, and not one of them was concerned about seeing an amazing specimen of undiscovered zoology get shot to death with machine guns within the first five seconds after he's discovered. All I needed was a single one of them saying, "No!! Don't!!" when the military starts firing -- you know, a couple lines to justify the presence of so many scientists. But no -- the scientists are either eaten by monsters, or they do absolutely nothing.
Really, that's my main problem with all the ancillary characters -- the majority of them either served no purpose whatsoever, or had unexpected, abrupt, meaningless deaths, which just mainly made me angry at the nihilistic laziness of the scriptwriter.
TIME PERIOD: For some reason, probably because every movie has a stupid soundtrack full of catchy oldies these days (I call this the Guardians of the Galaxy-effect) -- it totally escaped me when we were watching the trailer that this was a period film. So, at the beginning of this movie, I was somewhat taken by surprise when we suddenly found ourselves in the 1970's. Why? Because that's how they get around the fact that nowadays you could use Google Earth to zoom in on Skull Island and everybody would know that there was a giant monkey there. So I'm pretty sure they made it a period piece to limit the technology, and for no other reason.
SOUNDTRACK: Speaking of the soundtrack... the soundtrack was overwhelmingly obnoxious in this movie. They shoehorned in every "Vietnam era" pop song they possibly could -- it seemed like very five seconds we were being treated to another Creedence Clearwater Revival . It was very cliche, and got downright annoying after a certain point. (And outside the pop songs... I can't remember any other music. Which isn't a good sign.)
Just listen to "I See a Bad Moon A-Rising" twenty times while looking at this
picture and it'll have the same general effect as watching this movie.MORE PROBLEMS: They blew the reveal of King Kong. In the first five minutes of this movie, two people see King Kong. Granted, he's partly shrouded in shadow... but not enough to consider him hidden. What a waste of a reveal! Kong is the major selling-point of this movie... You need to tease the heck out of that, keeping him hidden as long as possible -- keeping the audience waiting and interested, wondering when King Kong is going to show up. It really made the ultimate reveal of Kong later in the movie shrug-worthy.
*shrug*ALSO....
One of the first things we see after we reach the island is the fleet of helicopters dropping firebombs -- and then we cut to a close up of a reflection of fire in one soldier's sunglasses, while an evil grin spreads across his face.
Wait, what? What point are they trying to make here? This movie seems to be under the impression that it's a war flick -- and it seems to have something to say about Vietnam, but it doesn't, really. They seem to be making some kind of point about Samuel L. Jackson's commander character being obsessed with war... and yet, half his motivation in the latter part of the film is not leaving one of his men behind, which is an honorable sentiment (and the other half his motivation is wanting to blow up King Kong because King Kong blew up his men, which at least stems from caring deeply for his men).
"I'm the main villain... but I'm basically a good person!"So, why is he such a bad guy? Better still to ask, "Why is this movie so deathly afraid of actually having a real bad guy?" Every character's basic raison d'etre is terribly muddled and vague.
Except for one... THIS GUY.
The reviews are in, folks, and the critics agree that John C. Reilly stole the show. Why? Firstly because he was some badly-needed comic relief. (His dialogue had personality, so I'm guessing he improvised most of it.) Second, it was a relief to stumble across one fully likeable character whose motivation was clear and made sense. There were no questions about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and whether or not we wanted him to succeed. If he had been the main character of this movie... it would have succeeded as a movie. The end.
THE THINGS THAT WERE GOOD: The CGI ape was good -- I can't fault it that. One of the few other good things I have to say about this movie is that it kept moving -- and that the story was substantially more entertaining to watch than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong (although I would like to point out that most things, including doing your taxes and sitting in a dentist's waiting room, are more entertaining than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong.) And I essentially liked that they stayed on Skull Island, because there are two things that you remember about the original King Kong (and two things which the remakes tend to have problems getting right) are: 1) the scene where King Kong fights the dinosaur, and 2), the scene where King Kong climbs the Empire State building. Because in this film Kong never leaves Skull Island, they were able to use the dinosaur fight as the climax of the film -- and it basically worked. I enjoyed the climax of the film.
I can't find a picture of that fight, so accept this Toho substitute.I also enjoyed one visual in this movie: when our pseudo-hero, Tom Hiddleston, runs into a cloud of green smoke, wearing a gas mask and cutting up monsters with a samurai sword. It was a really neat looking visual. It made me wish that I was watching a movie just about that, and that it didn't have the big muddled story of Kong: Skull Island wrapped around it.
OVERALL THOUGHTS: It's not "fun" bad like Twister -- and yet not quite as bad-bad as Godzilla (2014). I'm not going to compare it to the original King Kong, because that movie is iconic and it wouldn't be quite fair... but I'm also not going to talk about its relationship to the Toho version of King Kong, because, ultimately, it's not its relationship to either of those versions of Kong that makes it good or bad. Really, I'm not going to recommend that you see this movie mainly because it was just lazily written, and I don't think lazy movies should be rewarded anymore. If you desperately want some giant-monster in your life, I guess you could watch it -- but I can't give you any other reasons. Ultimately, it's just mediocre.
(Does that make it a good "popcorn movie"? Please see my post on "Popcorn movies.")
NOT RECOMMENDED.
Surprisingly, even with that low standard, it basically failed for me. Here's the trailer, so you know what we thought we were getting into:
It looked kind of fun, right? Well, here's the things that the movie got right: the CGI ape, the climax battle, and one visual of the "hero" running through a cloud of green smoke with a samurai sword. Now let's talk about everything else. (There are a lot of spoilers in here, so... you might want to watch the movie first, and then come back and see if you agree with me.)
THE CHARACTERS: For a start, a big problem with this movie was that there were just way too many characters. We had the male lead (Tom Hiddleston), the female lead (Brie Larson), the Samuel L. Jackson, the six to ten military guys he worked with, a random scientist, another random scientist, John Goodman, the two additional scientists, John C. Reilly, an entire village of natives...
This is only like half the people we're supposed to keep track of. Now, I understand that when you have a movie that means to feature people being killed in gruesome ways, you pad your film a bit with disposable people that you can easily kill off so that you don't run out of characters.
"Please beam down some more guys inred shirts."But most of those "disposable" characters should be either, a) morally-suspect people...
Such as Kevin Bacon's "naughty teenager" in Friday the 13th......or b) people that you're never given enough info to care about. They don't have a name, they don't have a background. They just serve to alert us, the audience, that this is a dangerous situation. People who actually do have names and backgrounds might still die, but they need a more meaningful, substantive death. Not everybody has to have a monologue -- but if we know who you are, and feel for you in some way, there should be some significance to your death. It needs to make us feel something that has significance to the story.
It doesn't have to be an ornament-worthy moment, but, you know....Which is why it really surprised me (not in a good way) when they randomly kill off John Goodman's character halfway through the film. John Goodman's character is responsible for the story -- he personally instituted this mission to Skull Island, and it seemed like things ought to really revolve around him. Maybe, by the end, he's learned a lesson about the value of human life or the nature of nature or whatever? However, it's like the scriptwriters had no idea what else to do with him after a certain point... so he has barely any dialogue after they reach the island, then he's unexpectedly eaten by a dinosaur, and never spoken of again. (Not unlike the despicable treatment of Bryan Cranston in a certain other giant monster movie, that was supposed to star Bryan Cranston -- only to have him randomly die about fifteen minutes in from having stuff fall on him?)
I am still upset about that one. I should have asked formy money back.Meanwhile, we have Samuel L. Jackson's character -- hamfisted "crazy military man", who becomes obsessed with the idea of killing Kong. My question for you is this: WHY ARE THE SAMUEL L. JACKSON CHARACTER AND THE JOHN GOODMAN CHARACTER SEPARATE CHARACTERS? John Goodman's character is shown as a bit loony to begin with, so why not just combine the two characters into one character who a) leads the mission to Skull Island for his own purposes, and b) those purposes turn out to be a goal of killing Kong, because he's CRAZY? Samuel L. Jackson had nothing to do until the end of the movie, and John Goodman had nothing to do after the beginning of the movie... so why not combine them?
I searched for a picture of John Goodman and Samuel L. Jacksontogether, and all the internet could give me was a picture of
sexy John Goodman. C'est la vie.Outside Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman... there were so many ridiculous ancillary characters that we had no time to get to know the people who were ostensibly our main characters, Tom Hiddleston and Cheese Larson. Tom Hiddleston is a "tracker", and Cheese is a war photographer who doesn't like the war. AND THAT'S IT. They have just the barest, merest, smattering of dialogue, and we don't ever get the chance to slightly care about them.
This is everything these characters do. You now haveno reason to see this movie.You know what? It's okay to have main characters who are ultimately not the main focus of the story, especially in this specific type of movie. That's fine! If you're like, "this is a special-effects movie and the real star is the giant monkey" -- that's fine!
But don't build up your human characters, then, as if you had something substantial to do with them later. Hiddleston is introduced like he's some kind of cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones... and his entire contribution to the movie is running fast and advising against adventuresome courses of action. Larson is introduced as if she's this hard-as-nails reporter who has strong moral convictions... and her main contribution to the movie is minor snark and not getting crushed when King Kong picks her up.
Not to beat this into the ground... but another thing this movie really missed was the "concerned scientist" character from all giant monster movies past -- "You can't blow him up! We need to study him... for science!"
This guy.There were like seven scientist characters in this movie, and not one of them was concerned about seeing an amazing specimen of undiscovered zoology get shot to death with machine guns within the first five seconds after he's discovered. All I needed was a single one of them saying, "No!! Don't!!" when the military starts firing -- you know, a couple lines to justify the presence of so many scientists. But no -- the scientists are either eaten by monsters, or they do absolutely nothing.Really, that's my main problem with all the ancillary characters -- the majority of them either served no purpose whatsoever, or had unexpected, abrupt, meaningless deaths, which just mainly made me angry at the nihilistic laziness of the scriptwriter.
TIME PERIOD: For some reason, probably because every movie has a stupid soundtrack full of catchy oldies these days (I call this the Guardians of the Galaxy-effect) -- it totally escaped me when we were watching the trailer that this was a period film. So, at the beginning of this movie, I was somewhat taken by surprise when we suddenly found ourselves in the 1970's. Why? Because that's how they get around the fact that nowadays you could use Google Earth to zoom in on Skull Island and everybody would know that there was a giant monkey there. So I'm pretty sure they made it a period piece to limit the technology, and for no other reason.
SOUNDTRACK: Speaking of the soundtrack... the soundtrack was overwhelmingly obnoxious in this movie. They shoehorned in every "Vietnam era" pop song they possibly could -- it seemed like very five seconds we were being treated to another Creedence Clearwater Revival . It was very cliche, and got downright annoying after a certain point. (And outside the pop songs... I can't remember any other music. Which isn't a good sign.)
Just listen to "I See a Bad Moon A-Rising" twenty times while looking at thispicture and it'll have the same general effect as watching this movie.MORE PROBLEMS: They blew the reveal of King Kong. In the first five minutes of this movie, two people see King Kong. Granted, he's partly shrouded in shadow... but not enough to consider him hidden. What a waste of a reveal! Kong is the major selling-point of this movie... You need to tease the heck out of that, keeping him hidden as long as possible -- keeping the audience waiting and interested, wondering when King Kong is going to show up. It really made the ultimate reveal of Kong later in the movie shrug-worthy.
*shrug*ALSO....One of the first things we see after we reach the island is the fleet of helicopters dropping firebombs -- and then we cut to a close up of a reflection of fire in one soldier's sunglasses, while an evil grin spreads across his face.
Wait, what? What point are they trying to make here? This movie seems to be under the impression that it's a war flick -- and it seems to have something to say about Vietnam, but it doesn't, really. They seem to be making some kind of point about Samuel L. Jackson's commander character being obsessed with war... and yet, half his motivation in the latter part of the film is not leaving one of his men behind, which is an honorable sentiment (and the other half his motivation is wanting to blow up King Kong because King Kong blew up his men, which at least stems from caring deeply for his men).
"I'm the main villain... but I'm basically a good person!"So, why is he such a bad guy? Better still to ask, "Why is this movie so deathly afraid of actually having a real bad guy?" Every character's basic raison d'etre is terribly muddled and vague. Except for one... THIS GUY.
The reviews are in, folks, and the critics agree that John C. Reilly stole the show. Why? Firstly because he was some badly-needed comic relief. (His dialogue had personality, so I'm guessing he improvised most of it.) Second, it was a relief to stumble across one fully likeable character whose motivation was clear and made sense. There were no questions about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and whether or not we wanted him to succeed. If he had been the main character of this movie... it would have succeeded as a movie. The end.
THE THINGS THAT WERE GOOD: The CGI ape was good -- I can't fault it that. One of the few other good things I have to say about this movie is that it kept moving -- and that the story was substantially more entertaining to watch than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong (although I would like to point out that most things, including doing your taxes and sitting in a dentist's waiting room, are more entertaining than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong.) And I essentially liked that they stayed on Skull Island, because there are two things that you remember about the original King Kong (and two things which the remakes tend to have problems getting right) are: 1) the scene where King Kong fights the dinosaur, and 2), the scene where King Kong climbs the Empire State building. Because in this film Kong never leaves Skull Island, they were able to use the dinosaur fight as the climax of the film -- and it basically worked. I enjoyed the climax of the film.
I can't find a picture of that fight, so accept this Toho substitute.I also enjoyed one visual in this movie: when our pseudo-hero, Tom Hiddleston, runs into a cloud of green smoke, wearing a gas mask and cutting up monsters with a samurai sword. It was a really neat looking visual. It made me wish that I was watching a movie just about that, and that it didn't have the big muddled story of Kong: Skull Island wrapped around it.OVERALL THOUGHTS: It's not "fun" bad like Twister -- and yet not quite as bad-bad as Godzilla (2014). I'm not going to compare it to the original King Kong, because that movie is iconic and it wouldn't be quite fair... but I'm also not going to talk about its relationship to the Toho version of King Kong, because, ultimately, it's not its relationship to either of those versions of Kong that makes it good or bad. Really, I'm not going to recommend that you see this movie mainly because it was just lazily written, and I don't think lazy movies should be rewarded anymore. If you desperately want some giant-monster in your life, I guess you could watch it -- but I can't give you any other reasons. Ultimately, it's just mediocre.
(Does that make it a good "popcorn movie"? Please see my post on "Popcorn movies.")
NOT RECOMMENDED.
No comments have been added yet.
