Review of Kong: Skull Island (2017) by Marcovelous — 14 Mar 2017

This review contains spoilers.

King Kong (2005) was one of my great childhood memories. I love how the seemingly dehumanized King Kong beast starts to develop emotional feelings with human beings. That film got a metascore of 81. And a decade later in 2017 we have Kong: Skull Island in which I thought it's a sequel to that film, and I chose to watch this film because it's one of the biggest titles this month. What turns out is that it's neither a prequel nor a sequel, it's just a standalone film, and it couldn't get me more disappointing. This film is NOT GOOD.

The biggest issue in this film is the plot. It is unadventurous as hell. It has no content and can be summarized in one sentence: some jerks go to an undiscovered island and either get killed or escaped. There's no character development at all. I mean, the protagonist should be Kong and it should be the focus of this film. But the audience know little about him. So I don't feel anything about him getting pissed off by the army or getting hurt fighting other species. And all the human characters are forgettable as well, especially the tribe (I feel so sorry for the tribe). The army are just being gunmen and waiting to get killed. The death scenes are terribly written. And because you know nothing about the soldiers, you don't really care if they survive or get killed, not even Conrad (Tom Hiddleston). They make him look very skillful for the first introduction and there's nothing skillful in him killing... uh, the birds? There isn't much connection between the characters. One of the try-hard here is the colonel aka captain of The Shield, so cliché that they just want to add one more gun shooting scene because he keeps moaning to find his 'brother' soldier. There are many jokes here. But unfortunately they feel dated, lame and awful. And they do not add anything to the narrative. And why is that woman taking photos with no purposes???? Somehow they try to add meaning to this film, when the woman said somehow the world isn't as bad as the colonel think it is, but one second later a stupid death scene just ruin it all.

The second thing I want to talk about is how unimaginative this film is. It is a bad copy of 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' (2016). All the ancient species are just plus-sized lizards, monkey, octopus, spiders and birds. Though I give credits to the boss fight scene which I think is just okay. With a budget of over 100 million dollars, anything apart from Kong or Skull Crawler looks cheap. The producers are not thoughtful about the CG which is not that great at all. Not that it was not convincing, but how predictable it is. At the beginning of the film, the second I saw Tencent Pictures' logo appear, I immediately sensed that the film wouldn't be anywhere good, if not great. I was right. This film has no substance, has no excitement, has no thought, has no flavor, has no effort in here. It's just a wishy washy throwaway with a lack of details. But you know what? The average popcorn movie lovers would love to pay for this. Great. I'm feeling a strong 1 to this film and it's definitely one of the worst films in 2017.

Oh, wait, Skull Island is only one of the first uncharted island? Kong is not the only King? There's a sequel to this crap? Oh, come on, no, please stop!!!

Lessons learned:

1. Only meet Kong when you're a woman.

2. The US army (or the US colonel) always make the worst decisions.

3. Don't take photos when you need to run.