Kong: Skull Island is less a remake of King Kong (the 1933, 1976, or 2005 versions) than a reconfiguration of the original film’s scenario. While the essential raw elements are there—expedition, island, colossal gorilla—the new film’s action never reaches New York. Ultimately, Skull Island is less influenced by preceding Kong features than by another, appropriately oversized film: Apocalypse Now.
Penned by a team of writers, Skull Island’s screenplay is standard adventure flick fare. Set in 1973, the story brings together a motley cast of characters for a mapping mission on the recently discovered titular isle. These include: a crackpot scientist (John Goodman) and his protégé (Corey Hawkins); an ex-SIS mercenary tracker (Tom Hiddleston); a war photojournalist (Brie Larson); and an embittered Army air assault colonel (Samuel L. Jackson) and his team, who are about to leave Vietnam for good. The colonel’s helicopters encounter Kong shortly after arriving on Skull Island, with predictable results. Most of the film is accordingly a wilderness thriller, as the scattered survivors attempt to reach an extraction point through a gauntlet of gigantic, preternatural beasts.
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Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts juggles a lot of tones and not always successfully. Skull Island is primarily a horror-flavored adventure tale, but the abundance of dark comic elements, vain stabs at pathos, and odd narrative subversions lend the feature an ungainly character. Still, the monster action is superb, terrifying stuff, easily besting recent entries like Jurassic World, and John C. Reilly as a stranded WWII pilot is a standout. The allusions to Apocalypse Now are shameless but resonant in their way, even though Skull Island isn’t a Vietnam allegory but a Vietnam aftermath allegory. The doomed foray to Skull Island stands in for every post-‘75 brushfire and quagmire that was supposed to salvage the U.S.’s trampled pride—and, of course, never has.
Kong: Skull Island opens Friday, March 10 in wide release.
