Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Explore the mysterious and dangerous home of the king of the apes as a team of explorers ventures deep inside the treacherous, primordial island.
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What critics say influenced Kong: Skull Island
The screenplay, which borrows some of the plot touchstones from the original 1933 “King Kong” but reshapes them, is credited to Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly.
The giant ape returns, though this Jurassic Park knockoff takes place neither in the Depression era, which gave us the original King Kong (1933), nor in the present, when satellite photos would surely alert us to the existence of a 100-foot gorilla.
It is worth remembering that when the original King Kong (now acknowledged as a classic) was first released in 1933, critics called it “a super goofy yarn about a 50ft ape who goes for a five-foot blonde”.
We are meant to recall “King Kong,” from 1933, when Fay Wray was similarly cradled, and other flickers of that film emerge: the finding of a lost tribe, and the hearty disagreements between Kong and his next-door neighbors—prehistoric monsters, which in this case pop up from underground.
Audiences have been going ape over “King Kong” since the “Eighth Wonder of the World” made his film debut in 1933.
Set in 1973, Kong: Skull Island repackages Hollywood’s 1933 King Kong along with other action-adventure movie trivia.
Hungry for a war he can win, Packard’s thread leans into the obsession and thirst for destruction of “Apocalypse Now,” giving the PG-13 adventure violence so shocking and graphic that it’ll likely have parents slapping protective palms over the bulging eyes of younger audience members.
Apocalypse Now influences paint an untamed, humid island with luscious accents, which are doubly-intense when “Skullcrawlers” threaten normality.
Jackson’s character, Packard, goes a bit down the Apocalypse Now path, which felt a little heavy-handed and forced at times, and while I enjoyed Larson’s performance in the film, too, I do wish the script had given her character more to do throughout the story.
Quick as you like, we're 'coptering through a storm to reach Skull Island, which the team immediately pelt with high explosives, waking Kong, who begins swatting them out of the sky like flies – so begins a conflict between the humans and the beasts of the island, hopped up on a '70s soundtrack and packed with visual nods to Apocalypse Now (right down to the poster and individual shots).
Even though the film’s trailer drew comparisons to Apocalypse Now, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts seems less inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film than its iconic poster of a setting sun , an image Skull Island returns to over and over.
Mix King Kong with The Lost World, spike it with a bracing dash of Apocalypse Now and you've got Kong: Skull Island, in which Warner Bros. finally gets the effects-driven fantasy adventure formula right again after numerous misfires.
Vogt-Roberts is on record calling this film a parable of the United States military getting swallowed by the jungles of Vietnam, just in case you didn’t notice all the homages to classic Vietnam movies, particularly Oliver Stone ’s “ Platoon ” and Francis Coppola ’s “ Apocalypse Now ” (the IMAX poster for “Kong: Skull Island” is even modeled on Bob Peak’s 1979 poster for Coppola’s film).
There are Platoon and Apocalypse Now references everywhere, and the film wholeheartedly embraces several of the Vietnam clichés so thoroughly sent up in Tropic Thunder almost 10 years ago, starting with era-specific musical cues.
The film does attempt intellectualism through its cultural references and anti-war message (not to mention its cinematographic and thematic homages to Platoon and Apocalypse Now), but it’s all lipstick on a monkey.
As the team explores the island, “Kong: Skull Island” consciously apes (sorry) the iconography of Vietnam War movies like “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon.”
His take on Kong is densely packed with references to earlier movies; not just the original King Kong, but also contemporary monster movies like Predator and Jurassic Park (there’s a very cute shout-out to that film in Jackson’s dialogue) and even left-field homages to, oh, Cannibal Holocaust.
The most notable of these involves a scene in which a giant spider impales one man from the mouth to his bottom, eerily recalling the famous impalement scene from Cannibal Holocaust that got its filmmakers brought up on charges of obscenity and later murder.
One minute, it’s bombarding you with comic ultraviolence and gore that would not be out of place in The Evil Dead or Cannibal Holocaust, and the next it’s legitimately very funny.
Censors would have never allowed him to stab a man through the throat with a spider leg, an image lifted directly from the banned 1980 exploitation flick Cannibal Holocaust.
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Once they land, they hunt one another in the jungle (it may be the first Tinseltown blockbuster to reference Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune’s Hell in the Pacific) until something appears to make them realize that their mano a mano battle is, in fact, small potatoes.
Coppola’s classic is his chief visual, if not tonal, touchstone (And it’s no coincidence we have characters called Conrad and Marlowe), but really the film is pulling from all kinds of Vietnam-era (And WWII – Hell in the Pacific gets a nod early on) media, giving us a cool soundtrack, some gnarly hardware and a crew of ass-in-the-grass grunts for the various beasties to chew on.
It opens with a Hell In The Pacific-style prelude set in 1944 and involving a Japanese officer and an American airman waging their own private war on the island before being interrupted by a gigantic creature with a huge furry paw.
He even adds a dusting of unexpected Easter Eggs with nods to Jurassic Park (Jackson sneering, “hold onto your butts”) and Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show (Reilly wearing a jacket emblazoned with Steve Brule’s motto “For your health!).
Instead Skull Island takes its visual cues from war movies, via Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with the wonder and world-building of Jurassic Park and an environmental subtext that links it to Godzilla.
Imagine taking Ian Malcolm out of Jurassic Park or Ripley out of Aliens.
In many ways, “Kong: Skull Island” is a “Jurassic Park” movie — and if viewed that way, it’s the best since the first.
Put King Kong out of your mind; this is neither sequel nor remake, but a whole new approach to the premise, with passing nods to Heart of Darkness, Jurassic Park, Moby Dick, and a host of other classic and pop culture touchstones.
In a normal cinematic climate, this wouldn’t be a novelty, but sci-fi action has so degenerated in recent years that to see one that’s not a succession of undifferentiated explosions feels almost nostalgic, like a throwback to the 1990s (think “Jurassic Park”).
No, this one is closer in spirit to the oddball sequels and spinoffs that have cropped up from time to time over the years that have taken the giant ape into increasingly weirdo situations in the likes of “Son of Kong” (1933), which offered up a kid-sized take on the story, the immortal “King Kong vs. Godzilla” (1962), the slightly-less-immortal “King Kong Escapes” (1967) and the jaw-dropping “King Kong Lives” (1986), in which the big ape was brought back to life from his plunge from the World Trade Center with an artificial heart the size of a car and hooked up with a similarly-sized female ape who give birth to his child in the climax.
It is, Randa promises, “the land where God did not finish Creation”—a line borrowed from the opening of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.
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Brie Larson, por su parte, deja mucho qué desear con su personaje Mason Weaver (en entrevisa con el director, nos señaló que era una clara referencia a Sigourney Weaver y su personaje en Alien ).
The island's creatures include spiders, water buffalo and what you might call "Alien"-looking secretaries of the interior, who give the mighty but melancholy Kong his daily workout.
Sometimes these combinations work quite well—with his take on “Godzilla,” Gareth Edwards came up with one of the very best films in the 50-year history of that franchise—and sometimes, as was the case when “Safety Not Guaranteed” auteur Colin Treverrow was given “Jurassic World,” the results have been dire personality-free messes.
The script by Dan Gilroy ("Nightcrawler"), Derek Connolly ("Safety Not Guaranteed") and Max Borenstein ("Godzilla") handles the character introductions with unusual finesse, and I loved details such as the Nixon bobblehead parked on the helicopter control panel, indicating the difficulty of flying through "perpetual storm system" to get to paradise/hell, aka Skull Island.
Regardless: Plenty of mileage in the scenes connecting the chaos stems from the script (by a trio of writers separately responsible for the great “Nightcrawler,” solid 2014 “Godzilla” remake and under-appreciated “Safety Not Guaranteed”) and the cast, particularly an excellent use of Brie Larson’s natural curiosity, integrity and generosity as photojournalist Mason Weaver.
Their directors, Jurassic ’s Colin Trevorrow and Kong ’s Jordan Vogt-Roberts, landed the gigs on the strength of a single, comparatively micro-budgeted indie feature debut ( Safety Not Guaranteed and The Kings of Summer , respectively).