Kong: Skull Island

Saw the latest bigass ape movie on Sunday, I enjoyed it a great deal!

This latest iteration of King Kong is probably the best version yet, it's well paced, mostly doesn't insult your intelligence, and even manages to have a little bit to say about colonialism, which was interesting at least.

Unlike Peter Jackson's attempt of a few years ago, this version wastes no time in getting to the fucking monkey. And that is a straight up improvement here, Kong is less of a character in this and more of an elemental force if that makes any sense, despite attempts at having him connect with Brie Larson, and honestly that is fine. Kong does his own thing, he doesn't need a connection and it is weird to me that one is always attempted.

I guess I should talk about the movie a little bit, set in the aftermath, and I mean like a week after, of the Vietnam War, John Goodman convinces a US Senator to back an expedition to a newly discovered island, the titular Skull Island of course, a place that historical shipping routes have always avoided and a place he thinks he can find monsters.

For a military escort he gets a helicopter squadron lead by Samuel L. Jackson and an ex-SAS tracker played by Tom Hiddleston, also tagging along is Brie Larson as an anti-war photographer there basically because she had nothing better to do, and assorted other guys who aren't important.

There are an implausible number of helicopters on the ship they use, but that doesn't matter because helicopters in monster movies exist only to be destroyed in increasingly creative ways, which happens rapidly as you might expect.

From there the movie takes it's queues from films like Apocalypse Now, as Jackson becomes increasingly unhinged during his quest to find enough bombs to murder Kong. The majority of the film is a contrast between the civilians who attempt to understand and adapt to their environment, and the military that attempts to dominate a land that doesn't want them and is indeed beyond their abilities anyway. So much so that by blundering around attempting to destroy a "threat" that turns out to not care about them too much, they inadvertently make things infinitely worse. There have been more subtle anti-war and anti-colonialism messages, but I submit to you that it is kind of unexpected to find them in a PG-13 rated blockbuster that is part of a shared movie universe.

I found the interaction with the human natives on the island to be amusing, the movie avoids the white savior narrative entirely, the Iwi are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and bemusedly tolerate our heroes presence among them for a time, and once they leave, life returns to normal once again.

Kong himself is treated with I daresay more respect than in previous films, he is larger in this version, perhaps on the order of three hundred feet tall, and absolutely the top dog(ape) on the island, the last of his kind, he wanders as he pleases and is content to exist on the island without hurting the humans, my view is that they were simply to small to be either a threat or a decent meal, so he largely doesn't pay attention to them, while his propensity for fighting and eating the other large monsters on the island means he provides a measure of protection to them just by existing.

There is never any discussion of taking him off of the island, and indeed the sane members of the expedition don't even want to try killing him, they all know better, the general consensus after the disastrous arrival on the island and finding out what was there was "we should go" and the the movie is all about that.

As a stand alone film it works well, and there are enough small references to the greater world of giant monsters that it does a good job of setting the stage for the inevitable later movies, which is fine by me, I like a good shared universe.
 I hope Kong comes out alright though, he seems like a nice enough sort.