Now out on DVD, Kong: Skull Island is an almost surreal film. It tries to be a war film, a giant monster film, and a dual homage to both Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now (itself loosely based on Conrad’s work) all at the same time! This mixture of genres doesn’t quite work, though.
After a pre-credits sequence that shows an American pilot and a Japanese pilot finding themselves trapped on Skull Island somewhere in the South Pacific during World War II, the film moves ahead to the year 1973. Government agent Bill Randa (John Goodman) hires former British SAS Captain James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) to help lead an expedition to explore Skull Island. Randa’s team, Conrad and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) are escorted to the island by an army helicopter squadron led by Lieutenant Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson).
Once the expedition arrives on the island, Packard’s men start dropping explosives to help map out the island. That bright idea winds up with Kong (a LOT bigger & taller than he was back in the original 1933 film that introduced him) taking on the soldiers, destroying their copters, and killing several men. While Conrad, Weaver, and other survivors try to make their way off the island (where they meet Marlow, one of the pilots we saw at the beginning of the film, played by John C. Reilly), Packard, vowing revenge, decides to lead his men into destroying Kong. (Yeah, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is another “influence” on the film.) Meanwhile, according to Marlow, there are also giant reptilian creatures known as “Skullcrawlers” on the island, who may be a bigger danger than Kong…
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein & Derek Connolly, working from John Gatins’ original story, decided that just having Kong battle monsters wasn’t good enough, so we get lots of “homages” to the aforementioned Conrad and Coppola works. Some scenes (especially the ones set in the island village where Marlow has made a home) look like the Coppola film. Plus, dig how they named the lead character “Conrad” while another character, Marlow, shares the name of the protagonist in Heart.
Yet for all of these literary and cinematic touches, Kong: Skull Island is still just a giant monster movie. There are some exciting monster brawls (Kong does not fool around!) and exciting soldiers-battling-monsters scenes, both of which are a lot of fun, despite pokey pacing, blah characters (Reilly’s slightly nuts Marlow is the only stand out), and an intrusive soundtrack relying on songs from the 60s & 70s, just to evoke the period the film takes place in. If you check your brains at the door, Kong: Skull Island is kind of fun.
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