#57: Kong: Skull Island

I've always found the Monsterverse to be okay. It got the job done. At least, unlike the Dark Universe, it didn't start off bad and get worse, but simply started off okay and got....okayer. 

So remember when I said in The Last of The Film Ones that out of all the 2017 movies I mentioned, there was one I hadn't mentioned in that post, because I admitted to myself that I hadn't given it a fair shot, and wanted to revisit it?

Well, this is it.

I originally saw this in DBOX, and that was my first DBOX experience.

It was totally worth the 0$ I paid. Normally it's about 18$ but thank you, Fandango's shitty network infrastructure! Glitched out and charged me nothing while giving me a ticket. But seriously, it was fun, and I would totally recommend you try it for action movies.

Also, WB cannot legally use the phrase King Kong in any of their movies. Reason why Godzilla vs. Kong isn't Godzilla vs. King Kong.

And there are technically two Godzilla cinematic universes between three studios, and the Toho Godzilla movies are very different than the Americanized Godzilla movies, as we saw earlier this year.

What were we on about again?

How the production value and design is actually amazing? It is, it really is. I also firmly, firmly believe that this should have won some kind of cinematography award for the Oscars. Really, it's so beautiful. Or costuming. Or set design!

Also a resounding round of applause that while this is a war movie, IT'S NOT ABOUT WORLD WAR II! It's about Vietnam. Parallel to Vietnam.

Oh!

How this movie has way too many good actors squandered.




So, who is in here? Wikipedia, show me how it's done -

The film stars Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson (Anger.), John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian (Who gets a whopping six lines or so in this movie and I always forget she's here), Toby Kebbell (💖💖💖), John Ortiz, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann (Who is underrated in general, if you have not seen Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, fix that.), Terry Notary, and John C. Reilly (Who completely steals the show. Completely. Because he is the only person who is not some third-tier soldier with a damn personality.).

Like...that's a lot of talent you wasted.

You have Oscar winners here, you have extraordinarily talented people here - Even the director wishes he could have cut a few people and given the remaining characters ... character.

I mean yes, these people had to read the scripts and audition and chose this but I wonder how much more of a person was on those pages than what made it to the screen.  There's backstory you know will never make it to the screen and then there's being the equivalent of a paper doll.

The story amounts to thus - "Wow, let's look at this island - What do you mean nearly everything is trying to kill us? Especially after we BOMBED THIS ISLAND? We have to leave!"

For a PG-13 movie, this is impressively gory, and I wish there was more of that. Like a dude is impaled through the mouth by some giant spider. People are squished and slammed and eaten with their skulls regurgitated. So cool.

So after about, oh, an hour and five minutes into the movie, it kind of turns into an odd mishmash of scenes that have poor coherence for a bit and there's a lot of talking.

This kind of vocalizes my problems with the Monsterverse between this and Godzilla: I didn't show up for interpersonal relationships. I came here for monsters. This is far better than Godzilla, at least there are about three more action pieces here.

But either make our characters more interesting, or have less of them, and make this the wild violent shit you aimed for.