Kong is a strange beast: A review

Kong is a strange beast.

Not Kong the creature but Kong:Skull island, the movie. Conceptually it is great. It is a breath of fresh air when compared to all that has come before. A Vietnam Era, ‘Heart of darkness’ style story with monsters and Kong.

But this freshness and potential is squandered, saving for a few interesting set pieces and visual spectacle. The characters are plain two dimensional, the writing is shallow and the dialogue is clearly unrealistic. The problems first creep in when the film tries to take itself too seriously. There are plenty of scenes that are supposed to convey great emotional depth and intense drama but are unintentionally funny. And the scenes where the movie actually tries to be funny do not work all the time. There are a few hits but plenty of misses.

Kong looks great, the fights and the action looks great. But the movie has no anchor. The editing is bizarre, the pacing is distracting at times and the movie for all its memorable sequences is ultimately forgettable. It won’t stay with you after you have left the theater. It would be just “the new Kong movie”.

There’s nothing substantially new that we haven’t seen before. Kong battling other huge monsters has been done before to similar effect in earlier incarnations of Kong but those movies had an emotional and thematic weight which this film lacks. This film lacks the gravitas which the new Godzilla movie had.

The film tries too hard to be cool, with its quirky yet distracting soundtrack and all the unnecessary slow-mo. The attention to visuals is sadly not translated to the characters and their arcs.

Hopefully the upcoming battle of the Kings will have the right combination of crazy monster fun and decent writing.

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