‘Kong: Skull Island’ Features Towering Action, Minuscule Characters

There are few cinematic images as iconic as the Eighth Wonder of the World, King Kong, climbing atop the Empire State Building. It’s such an iconic image that there have been numerous attempts to recapture that feeling of awe and wonder in remakes and sequels, yet all stand in the shadow of the original King Kong. Just over a decade after Peter Jackson brought his own remake of King Kong to the screen, the mighty beast is resurrected again with Kong: Skull Island, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ highly visceral update that isn’t quite a sequel and not quite a remake. Kong: Skull Island delivers some stunning spectacle but all these moments of visual splendor are underserved by the film’s paper-thin characters, many of whom are barely memorable in the moment.

Taking place in 1973, Kong: Skull Island opens with Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) and Bill Randa (John Goodman) are about to meet with a senator about funding an expedition. They have found an undiscovered island. “A place where myth and science meet,” one of them remarks in their pitch. They are to need armed reinforcements for this expedition, and luckily for them Nixon has just declared “peace with honor” in Vietnam, leaving Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and his team of troops ready for their next assignment. Joining them on this journey will be James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), a former British special forces agent and all-around smart guy, and Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), a photojournalist, as well as a team of other scientists led by Victor Nieves (John Ortiz) to study the terrain of this mysterious island.

Because Skull Island is surrounded by a “perpetual storm system” that has obscured it from human eyes for centuries, Packard and his men will have to lead the expedition onto the island by helicopter with a rendezvous set at the north of the island three days later. They’re not even able to begin the expedition in earnest until the King Kong makes his presence known, splitting up the members of the expedition and killing a whole lot of people. While James Conrad is concerned with keeping everyone alive, Preston Packard is concerned with revenge, seeking out munitions lost in a helicopter crash to take out his vengeance on King Kong. As Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), a pilot stranded on the island since World War II who has been living with a tribe of natives, tells Conrad and Weaver, Kong isn’t even the most nefarious beast on the island, and he serves as a protector against those worse threats. There’s a battle coming and it’s just a matter of which side those on the ground find themselves on.

The establishing of these characters in the film’s first few scenes are quite lively in their pacing and comedic timing. All matters related to character quickly devolve in the screenplay by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connolly (from a story by John Gatins). There’s no kind way of putting this, so I’ll just say it: Kong: Skull Island features two of the blandest lead characters in blockbuster of recent memory in James Conrad and Mason Weaver. Neither character has a story arc, instead they just roam the island from set piece to set piece but they’re not driven by any other factors beneath their surface level introductions as a photojournalist and a wise, highly competent tracker. These are characters without faults or purpose, and is ultimately a waste of two talented and highly charismatic actors in Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson.

Early on, you’d suspect that the film is establishing key character dynamic in presenting Goodman’s Randa as a driven scientist and Jackson’s Packard as a soldier lost without a conflict, but you’d be wrong. These are characters that have the foundations of a character arc, one that will lead to a terse standoff, but it just fades away from the picture to underwhelming results. However, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John C. Reilly have the film’s most interesting characters, but it just never seems that the film is always sure which way to take them. There’s a scatterbrained approach to the characters to film’s colorful supporting characters that works contra to whatever the film seems to be attempting in any given scene, especially when it comes to mortality of certain supporting players.

The character issues are really noticeable because they undermine some of the film’s highly stylized, stunning action sequences. Directing his first big budget blockbuster, Jordan Vogt-Roberts shows a skill for crafting impressive moments of purely visceral action, but it’s hard to care beyond what’s happening beyond “Oh, that looks cool,” because you don’t care about the characters. As pure spectacle, however, Kong: Skull Island delivers the goods and establishes Vogt-Roberts as a top emerging talent on the Hollywood scene. The film may suffer from issues with its characters but Kong: Skull Island is never boring and features some great looking moments, but they’re just not as all-encompassing great as they could be.

There’s no subtext in Kong: Skull Island, just text. There’s an obvious nature to this blockbuster that extends well beyond just its obvious homages to Apocalypse Now and Jurassic Park, extending into its soundtrack of Vietnam movies’ greatest hits and dialogue that just puts everything out there in the bluntest terms possible. Despite its numerous and noticeable flaws, it’s impossible not to be entertained by the lavish spectacle on display in Kong: Skull Island even if it lacks the heart and emotion that it aims for in certain scenes. And yet it is still hard not to consider Kong: Skull Island a disappointment because it is always teetering on the brink of being something so much more than just a pretty good blockbuster and never crosses over. Kong is supposed to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, not just a pretty good blockbuster.