Kong: Skull Island
I think the thing that threw me when I first watched “Kong: Skull Island” in 2017 was how little it really played into the iconic story of King Kong that we’ve known from the primary versions of the story. Watching it the second time in preparation for “Godzilla vs. Kong,” I fell more into the way Jordan Vogt-Roberts is bringing Kong into the Monsterverse, and how, what it doesn’t repeat in telling Kong’s story is for the better when developing him to go up against Godzilla, rather than telling his own story. This is about a future clash of the titans, not just the individual narrative; when taken in this context, “Skull Island” is a rousing adventure epic.
Before we go much further, I want to pay respect to the way this film- and its screenplay by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly- fits this particular story in the time in which it is set. After a prologue set in 1944, the film continues in 1973, on the day that President Nixon has announced the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Bill Randa (John Goodman) is the head of the Monarch program, which we were introduced to in 2014’s “Godzilla.” He is trying to get resources for a trip to Skull Island before funding for the program runs out. He gets it by appealing to Cold War sentiments, and it’s not long before he and Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) are leading a team to the island, although Packard’s men do not know what they’re getting into. Watching Packard’s arc throughout the film, I couldn’t help but think the film was using its narrative to comment on how these soldiers, once again, have been thrown into an unwinnable situation where their lives are expendable to people at the top, at the behest of people unfamiliar with what it’s like to be in a war. When Packard essentially goes off the deep end, and is singularly obsessed with destroying Kong, it comes from the frustration of going from one clusterfuck to another, and seemingly seeing his men die for nothing if the enemy is not defeated.
The team that goes to Skull Island is not just soldiers, but Randa and his assistant (Jason Mitchell), a tracker (Tom Hiddleston) and an anti-war photographer (Brie Larson). That the part of the Monarch team is the only contingency that has any semblance of an idea of what they’re getting into certainly shows a gross negligence befitting a Kong movie, but fits in to the political ideas the film is leaning into. Having Larson’s Mason Weaver be purely anti-war means that, when the truth about Kong’s place in the island’s ecosystem is revealed, her turn to sympathetic heroine to the ape fits within the parameters of the typical Kong film, although the film- thankfully- avoids the sympathetic connection Kong has to the woman, which usually results in his downfall in his movies. Since in this one, he doesn’t leave the island, he’s safe for one movie.
“Kong: Skull Island” is a two-hour Kong movie where we stay on the island, and get variations on the Spider Pit sequence that was cut from the original film. The look at the natives on the island even plays out differently, partially because they have an unexpected American living among them in Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), who was in the 1944 prologue. The ways the film deviates from the traditional Kong arc is why it works, and why we can’t help but get excited for the battle to come with the King of the Monsters himself.
