Movie Review- Kong: Skull Island

I had a date once. 

For anyone who knows me and all my quirks and general absurdities this might come as a surprise, perhaps a shock, but I assure you I'm not lying. There was a date and we had the sort of dinner spent sitting across from one another while words were exchanged and laughter ensued in that kind of way where you laugh because you feel like you're supposed to laugh and you smile because simply staring seems creepy. The dinner was filling even though, for the money, you knew you'd be hungry again in a matter of hours. The conversation was fine even though, for a date, you would've hoped it'd have a bit more depth. And the companionship, such that it was, was pleasant enough to remind me for those few moments that I wasn't completely alone in the world. 

I never saw her again, so that was nice. (And quite the accomplishment considering the small size of the city in which I live). 

It wasn't that I didn't have a nice time, either. She was very conversational, very sweet, and very attractive, and for anyone who knows what dating is like you know that those are three very important "very's". But after we parted ways and wandered off to go the rest of our lives without communicating, the feeling of enjoyment faded with the understanding that absolutely nothing of consequence had been said for the entirety of a three to four hour long date. She said a lot of things about other people and other friends, and I smiled and nodded in encouragement because that's what you do when you're trying not to be rude. Then she talked about a friend she used to have that cheated on a boy with another boy. Then she talked about this one fellow she dated for awhile that had a dog but she didn't like dogs. Then she talked about this friend of hers who was always clingy but not too clingy that they weren't still friends. Then...

I'm sure by now you're beginning to see the problem.

In truth, I left that date knowing two things about that girl: 1. She had quite a few friends who do not seem like people I'd like to call friends. 2. She didn't like dogs. And for all those words that floated in the air, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was keeping them suspended when they should've dropped to the tile floor like the emotionless rocks they were. It was like reading a comic book where all the dialogue bubbles were filled with dead space or dust.

I saw Kong: Skull Island today and I left that movie with one thought rattling around in my head: "Huh. So this is what a second date would've felt like."

It's not that Kong is a bad film, not really. It's just that it's a film. It's not good, it's not bad, it's not going to give you an STD or an engagement ring, it just...is. For all its bells and whistles, and I assure you there are quite a lot of those, it's a purely dispensable exercise in excess with every bit of emphasis spent on surface sheen instead of inner depth. I'd like to tell you the plot but it's not worth the ten words it'd take to explain. I'd like to tell you the names of some of the characters, but I have no idea what they are as the movie spent the entirety of its run time wandering through forests in a misguided attempt to build tension by forcing us to care about characters we were never even given the time or nuance to know.

Tom Hiddleston plays a tracker who's incredibly good with a sword in a movie about giant everythings. That's nice. Brie Larson is an anti-war photographer who is very anti-war. Again, nice. John Goodman is Skinnier John Goodman and he stomps around trying to find proof that he isn't crazy, only to endanger everyone's lives on a crazy mission chasing monstrous killing machines to prove that he isn't crazy. And Samuel L. Jackson chews scenery in the only role that is given any character meat as a soldier who doesn't know how to do anything but soldier and lead his men, only to become a raging caricature at the drop of a hat because that's what the movie needs him to do. All other characters, save for John C. Reilly's punchline-delivering Survivor contestant, are cannon-fodder for Kong and the hellish lizard creatures to whom 90% of the budget was devoted to making look as menacing as possible. 

To the filmmaker's credit, it can at least be said that it succeeds there. Kong looms as he's never loomed before (and far more effectively than he did in Peter Jackson's drastically overlong melodrama) and he dispenses godlike vengeance on the Lizards From Hell who have been realized here as pure nightmare fuel. The battles that rage for almost the entirety of this movie and at the expense of everything relating to character development are indeed a sight to behold, and for that the director must be given his due credit. Yet it must be said that I wanted more.

I wanted to head for home excited by the prospect of a monster universe Kong shared not just with Godzilla but with compelling humans as well. I wanted to care when nameless grunts died for the sake of the next special effects sequence. I wanted to sit back and think to myself, "Wow. I'm quite glad I care about the world that will certainly be in peril at some point". Instead, I found myself back in that restaurant listening to stories about people I didn't know in situations I couldn't connect with because I was mired in a world of petty gossip instead of compelling heart.

Once again my companion, as beautiful as she was, just didn't possess the depth I was looking for.

Kong: Skull Island was a monster movie pure and simple. But that doesn't mean I didn't go in hoping it would be just a little bit more than that.

2 Giant Raging Apes out of 4.