Monsters have a tendency to show up late to their own movies. It doesn’t matter if the film is named after them, or if they’ve already murdered their way through half the cast, the drama queens won’t let anyone see their face until the climax rolls out. If they’re starring in more of a horror movie than an action flick, keeping the monster just out of sight can be much scarier than just waving them around in front of an audience. But when the monster is larger than most skyscrapers, still somehow managing to keep them offscreen comes off more like skimping on CGI than successful suspense.
Legendary Entertainment’s Godzilla (2014), for instance, had about eight minutes of actual-honest-to-God Godzilla in a 123 minute movie about Godzilla immigrating to America from Japan. So when I heard they were planning another movie, this time about everyone’s favorite oversized gorilla, I was concerned. The inclusion of well-known actors like Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson had me even more concerned; I could easily see Kong: Skull Island being about some random squishy humans and their emotions instead of a giant angry human-squishing ape.
But I guess after seven movies Kong finally got over his stage fright, because Skull Island is non-stop monkey-on-helicopter-on-squid-on-skullcrawler action from a blessedly brief cast introduction sequence to the after credits sequence that almost gave me a heart attack. For me, that’s enough to put this version of King Kong up with Pacific Rim and Mad Max: Fury Road on my list of “action movies that actually gave me what I showed up for.” Also notable: no blatant racism or bestiality! That’s far from a guarantee for Kong movies, guys, Legendary really dodged a bullet there.
Also notably, despite having a large cast of relatively one-note characters (a must for any movie that plans on racking up sudden, violent deaths), Skull Island had two character arcs capable of holding the audience’s attention; Kong himself, and Samuel L. Jackson’s Colonel Packard. If you caught any of their intense staredown in the trailer, you probably know what I’m talking about. Jackson’s acting is so intense in this movie he seems to have the same physical presence as the titanic CGI ape. The rest of the cast (with the exception of John C. Reilly’s hilarious and welcomed comic relief as castaway Hank Marlow) was so comparatively forgettable that I’m not even sure what their opposition to Packard’s “the war can never be over for me and I know a new enemy when I see one” even was. I think it was something about protecting endangered species, unless the species in question looks like toothy armed sperm, in which case it needs to be wiped off the planet as quickly as possible.
Not that they’re wrong, per se, I had the same reaction after being exposed to the Skullcrawlers for longer than the thirty seconds of air time they got in the trailer. They just look fundamentally wrong on at least three separate levels. Everything else on this island is just an abnormally large naturally occurring creature, and then when they were designing the enemy monsters someone at Legendary just went “okay, but what if we gave a snake human arms?”
My disgust, unknown Legendary employee, you would get my disgust.
On the bright side, watching these abominations get curb-stomped was an immensely enjoyable experience for me, so if their very existence doesn’t bother you on an existential level, check out the video documentation of their extinction while it’s still in theaters. Big screen giant-ape-driven destruction looks better than any other kind of giant-ape-driven destruction, except maybe for in-person giant-ape-driven destruction. But I’m not allowed to recommend things that could kill you, so you should probably just go see Kong: Skull Island.