As it goes, I still found a lot to admire in the latest King Kong adventure. Unlike most of the other incantations we have seen, this film takes place in the 1970's just days after the end of the Vietnam War. A guy named Will Randa (John Goodman) seeks government funding to explore a newly-discovered island in the South Pacific. Can you guess what it's called? It could be the last-known untouched ecosystem in a continually developing world. What happens? Of course the money is hesitantly granted, and a crackpot team needs to be gathered. The crew needs a military escort, guided by a single-minded Colonel (Samuel L. Jackson) and his crew. They find a war photographer to document the endeavor (Brie Larson), and they need a tracker (Tom Hiddleston) to help navigate their way through the uncharted terrain.
Unlike 2005's King Kong, this film immediately jumps into the action. I think that's an improvement, the way the film realizes it's little more than a B-monster movie. Instead of working hard to develop these characters, we land headfirst in this savage world. The initial helicopter descent onto Skull Island is one of the great sequences in any King Kong movie thus far. The initial run-in with Kong (who is an enormous monolith in comparison to other incarnations) is a shocking sight - a gorilla nearly 20 stories tall. He plucks the helicopters out of the sky like flies, and the survivors are left miles apart with a simple deadline: reach the north shore within 3 days for rescue.
This is where the movie falls into trouble. Not only do we need to keep track of multiple characters in various settings (the soldier who dreams of seeing his child once again, the revelation that John Goodman's character knows more than he leads on, a forced romance between the two marketable stars...) but the film becomes an episodic journey in which our heroes A) meet a monster, B) shoot the monster, C) run from monster, D) repeat. The characters we are forced to live with are not only given enough to do on screen, but they fall into action tropes that are simply quite silly (Tom Hiddleston makes a poor action star as he slashes his way through monsters with a knife, and the botanist is a much better shot with a machine gun that I would have believed). Either you turn your brain off and enjoy the action, or you need to think about how the motivation for any of these characters was determined. I choose the former.
John C Reilly makes a surprising and comical appearance as a WWII veteran whose plane crashed on the island 30 years before. He has made friends with the natives, knows the island like the back of his hand, and serves to deliver expository dialogue when filmmakers couldn't find a more visual means. In contrast with the rest of the cast Reilly feels like he's cast in a different movie altogether, but he's the one person that actually delivers memorable scenes and dialogue. The film's conclusion is a bit too hammy and features a scene following Reilly's reuniting with his long-lost wife. In another film that might work. In a monster movie, rolling this touching scene over credits falls flat.
I liked the movie because it found a new Kong narrative outside the one we come to expect. In fact there is barely a relationship formed between the female lead (Larson) and the monster. Instead of kidnapping Kong and bringing him to New York (with his size that would prove impossible), the conclusion is simply surviving the island in one piece. Yes, Sam Jackson's character is the most unoriginal villain this side of Avatar, and his motives by the end of the movie are there only to provide conflict when there is none. Peter Jackson's remake in 2005 is surely a more accomplished film, but in terms of an escapist romp through the jungle, this one could have been a lot worse. For what it is (an early Spring action blockbuster remake/reboot release setting up a cinematic universe) it was still a fun ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment