Kong: Skull Island (2017).

This is awkward.  It's not the sort of confession you make in an article dealing with this kind of subject.  The fact is I'm not sure I was ever all that much of a Godzilla fan as a lot of others out there.  I remember watching a very truncated, Americanized version (featuring Raymond Burr, of all people) back when I was too much of a non-grown-up to know any better.  And that's sort of the whole point.  My knowledge about the Great Big Lizard and his exploits haven't really advanced much since then.  The closest I've come to advancing my understanding of the lore is to watch a very useful retrospective documentary on the subject that lays out all the facts about the original first film that I've seen in just a fragmentary fashion.  Aside from that?  The awful truth is I've just never really managed to find the right door into this particular franchise.

If talking about the giant radioactive lizard sounds like a strange way to begin a review of a film about a giant ape, then that's also sort of the point.  The trouble is I can't just talk about Kong: Skull Island without mentioning the franchise of which it forms an ostensible part.  It doesn't help that I don't have a clue where to begin talking about that either.  Some time ago, it was decided to try and relaunch the long-standing Fire Breathing Monster franchise for Millennial audiences.  The first attempt out of the gate, 2014's Godzilla was a respectable hit with audiences.  The film under discussion today was meant to be it's follow-up.  And as of this date it's the only franchise entry I ever bothered to see.  Even then the reason was pretty simple.  It featured the big damn ape.

I'd been more or less a fan of his ever since he made me keep running to hide behind the couch at the age of about 8.  I'm talking about the original 1933 version.  Some people, after viewing that film, will say its impossible to get any kind of genuine reaction out of a relic like that.  I'm inclined to ignore such judgments.  Besides, their skepticism doesn't change the fact that it's what happened.  It's the only possible reason for why I should have any kind of interest in Jordon Vogt-Roberts's attempt to bring the King to life again.  The real question is, is it good or bad?

The Story.

Churchill once said history would be kind to him because he was gonna write it.  I guess he got lucky.  Still, maybe the joke was on him after all.  Most kids on the street these days don't even have a clue of who he is, what he did, or even if there's a reason for remembering he even existed.  That's the kind of mistake that can come back to haunt you, if you're not careful.  That's the way a lot of the world seems to work.  Someone comes along with enough brains to put a kind of fail-safe in place.  Then, the years pass, memories start to fade, and pretty soon nobody even remembers the fail-safe exists until everyone's back is to the wall.  I guess if it proves anything, it's that sometimes it pays to have a long memory.  It might just save your life.

Most everybody remembers or at least knows about World War II.  They know a little about the basic setup, and a smattering about the major players involved.  It's easy to remember certain names and dates.  Take December 7th and Pearl Harbor, the one that lives in infamy (unless time finds a way to cancel it out).  Then there's D-Day, the biggest military operation in history.  You had a number of beaches, three good to decent enough landings, and one massive FUBAR of a failure that somehow winds up the most important victory.  That's what makes the history books, at least.  What gets lost in the shuffle is the names on the ground, the one's who made it all possible.  They're the unremarkable ones, except for that brief span of time when the spotlight history shown on their accomplishments, and then just as quickly it retreats, leaving the rest of their stories untold.  That's not such a bad thing for some of them, but it is for me.

It's not for the reasons you might think.  I not out there looking for some kind of recognition or glory, or any of that crap.  Most of us would like nothing better than to put all that stuff in the rear-view mirror and leave it in the dust.  At least that's what happens in normal cases.  My circumstance wasn't normal however.  You ever hear of the U.S.S. Lawton?  Didn't think so.  Why should you?  What was the name of the ship that launched the troops onto Omaha Beach?  Don't know that one either, do you?  Who was Omar Bradley?  No dice again.  Yeah, that figures.  It's always the same.  Guys like us never make it in the history books.  That wouldn't bother me at all if something didn't happen to me out there on the sea.  I was a crewman aboard the Lawton.  We were stationed out in the Pacifc during the War.  We were attacked in the night, and it was bad enough to take Lawton and almost all hands on board down to the depths.  I'm the only one who made it out.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking.  Just another ex-soldier suffering from survivor's guilt.  Well, who knows, maybe that's part of it.  I'll tell you something nobody else knows.  It wasn't an enemy sub or warship that sunk the Lawton.  This was something else.  I was there.  It wasn't just sunk either.  It got dragged down into the deep.  What it looked like was something out of a nightmare.  Either that or a sea-serpent managed to crawl its way out of a kiddie's storybook and latch onto our ship.  I know how that must sound.  It's gotta be something out of a bad trip, I know.  Yet it's real.  I'll swear on a stack of bibles if I have to.  The good news is you don't have to take my word for it.  You see I'm not all by my lonesome on this.  I belong to a group known as Monarch.  You might say our job is to catalogue and classify "anomalous life-forms", creatures or animals that are, by definition, off the beaten track.  The thing that sunk the Lawton was one of them.  It's just possible that we've found the location of another.

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean is a small island.  It's a place that has remained hidden away for all this time.  It existed for ages as little more than old folktales passed around by sailors.  The sea is a natural breeding place for such stories.  Otherwise we wouldn't have the Mary Celeste or the Bermuda Triangle.  Then there's the Ourang Medan, which no one has been able to verify.  This island is different somehow.  It's as if one of those old legends somehow fond a way to come to life.  Recently, Land Sat satellites picked up an unidentified speck of land in the Pacific.  It had never shown up on any of the maps because the technology didn't exist to pick it out until now.  It matches the exact location of all the tales.  It even matches the look that gives the legend its name: Skull Island.  This find is one hell of an opportunity.  I'm scraping together both funds and personnel for a little expedition to those coordinates.  You're welcome to tag along, if you want.  Just make sure you got all the necessary equipment you'll need for one hell of a long camping trip.

Just one more thing.  Can you shoot a gun, or know how to carry a weapon?  If you do, be sure and bring as much ammo and artillery as you can manage.  I know this is just a scouting, surveying and mapping expedition.  However, sometimes it's just better to be safe than sorry.  The reason why is cause of what all the legends say.  According to some old sea-farers, Skull Island is a home for beasts, a land of monsters.

An Archaeological Throwback.

They really don't make 'em like this anymore.  Kong owes its success to the fact that, like its titular character, it's something of a throwback to a bygone age.  I'll admit when I first heard they were releasing yet another vehicle in the Kong franchise, my first thought was a basic "pass".  That's cause I'd sort of grown a bit too weary of re-boots before it became the trend it is now.  What made me change my tune was a review by an actual professional critic, John Kenneth Muir.  He was the one who got me to give the film a second look.  The way it works is that I think Muir is one of few viewers of the film whose done a more than decent enough job of getting somewhere at the truth of the story.

It's because of this that this review is bit less original than all the others.  I often like to bring together as much extra critical commentary on any given artwork if it seems like it's important enough.  There's not much different when it comes to this film.  The major distinction is that this has got to be the first time when I find myself having to defer so much to another contemporary in one space.  We'll get to hear Muir's take on this flick in short enough order.  For the moment, it's enough to ease the reader into his insights as we go along.  In order to reach the destination, however, there's still the film itself to contend with.

The movie itself is one of those popcorn flicks that tends to sneak up on you with the level of talent involved.  It has this neat way of lulling you into thinking all you're going to get is just another cheap knock-off, and then goes on to reveal a surprising number of depths to its story.  One aspect of the film that grabs a close reader's attention occurs during the opening credits.  It's the first hint you get that we're dealing with one of those rare filmmakers who isn't just genre savvy.  He's also got a fare degree of historical, and maybe even artistic literacy.  That can sometimes be a good first sign that your at least in somewhat competent hands.  The second fact that will strike any attentive viewer is that Roberts seems unafraid to wear it all on his sleeve as he takes you into the film's secondary world.  That's a rare sight in an age when the role of director has devolved into little more than a hired hand for an industry focused on where their next tent-pole is coming from.

Even the likes of Spielberg and Scorsese seem to have less freedom to make the pictures they want like they did in a different era.  This makes Roberts achievement just a bit more impressive when you realize he's essentially stuck having to work in these same parameters.  That he was able to realize something like an actual vision for the film might have been the norm in an earlier age, like the 70s.  These days it probably says something about the current nature of showbiz when the hired hand is able to exert some control over the material, however minor.

The literacy on display mainly comes from the sense of understanding that Roberts has about the look and feel of the era in which the story is set.  He's done a good job at letting us buy into the cultural background of the action.  There are times when you do get the sense of an America and a general world as it was way back during the time when Elvis and John Lennon were both still alive.  This also carries over sometimes into the way Roberts composes his shots.  It doesn't happen all that often, yet there are occasions when the director throws off an image that looks like it could have come from either an indie filmmaker like Arthur Penn, or else what could happen if you dropped an era centric documentarian like D.A. Pennabaker into the middle of a Vietnam-like setting.

Another piece of actual literacy comes in when the audience is treated to a botched re-telling of the fable of "The Mouse and the Lion".  It's an obvious setup and a somewhat interesting way for Roberts to telegraph certain plot developments later down the road for the audience.  I also suppose there's a kind of basic level of anthropological awareness (of sorts) involved in how the script treats the delicate subject of the Skull Island natives.  For once, the subject is treated in an interesting light.  If you pay close attention, after a while you begin to realize the film is laying out the fictional human culture of the island in a way that almost makes a kind of societal sense.  You a set of tribal elders, the leaders of the hunters, the gatherers, a high-priest and priestess.  These are all elements that the film never quite spells out, and it may be a deliberate choice.  It just leaves the characters in the frame and allows the viewer to connect the dots.  It's got to be the first time I can ever recall that one particular element of the mythos has been handled with something like actual sensitive skill.  That's another way in which the film is able to at least be somewhat clever in a flash second of runtime.

I think all this literacy is on display best, however, when Roberts is able to compile and edit together a series of era-centric clips and audio recordings that help paint the picture of the world Roberts wants us to inhabit.  All this is impressive, yet the real good news is that Roberts isn't interested in the visuals just for their own sake.  In calling up a bygone age, Roberts also seems to take a keen interest in the varying and sometimes combative philosophies that animated the 60s and 70s.  This is where Muir's observations almost have to take over.  He spells it out a lot better than I can.  A lot of it comes from the way the film portrays one of its main leads, the figure of Col. Packard, played by Samuel L. Jackson.

"At its heart, Kong: Skull Island seems to be a tale about what happens to men -- good men -- when they fight a war that they don’t understand, don’t believe in, or feel is somehow unjust. 

"Packard loves and honors his men, those he serves with, but he has totally lost his moral barometer, and therefore the ability to understand what is best for them. When many of his soldiers are killed in an attack by Kong -- in an incredibly tense and well-sustained action sequence -- all he can see is the need to kill an enemy. Packard doesn’t see, for example, that what is goon for his team is to get the surviving men out of danger.  That would be, in his eyes, cutting and running, and he is never, ever going to do that again.

"Packard’s understanding of Kong, and the situation on Skull Island, is deliberately juxtaposed in the film with the perspective of Marlow (John C. Reilly), a World War II veteran who crashed on the island in 1944, and who has come to not only respect the native people, and Kong, but even his enemy: a downed Japanese pilot. 

"Marlow -- named after the protagonist of Heart of Darkness -- perhaps because his war was perceived as just and necessary by his people, and by those who served -- is able to maintain his moral compass in a way that Packard cannot.  He is able to understand Kong’s role on the island, and see the giant ape as something other than a rampaging monster. He respects Kong’s role as guardian of the people, and furthermore can explain Kong’s violent behavior towards Packard’s team. 

"Packard’s men came to the island and began dropping bombs, with no warning, no prologue. These bombs not only threaten the wild-life on the surface, as we see in several sequences of deer-like animals running from the explosions, but also threaten to awake Big Daddy Skull Crawler from his subterranean slumber.  This monster killed Kong’s parents, but is now quiescent. Packard’s actions are not only harming innocents, but threatening to awake a sleeping giant. 

"Marlow says it well, himself: “Kong’s a pretty good king. Keeps to himself, mostly. But you don’t go into someone’s house and start dropping bombs, unless you’re picking a fight.”

"Packard has been itching for just such a fight. To prove to himself, and others, that he didn't lose in Vietnam.

"Again, consider these two men in balance. One is able to see the incursion on the island as a provocative move that demands Kong’s response (as king). The other, Packard, believes he is king, and that it is his prerogative to choose the fate of the island.  

"And one man comes from a war of honor; the other from a war without any clear overriding moral purpose.  

"When there is no clear overriding purpose in war (except to win), any technique, any strategy that keeps one alive, or in control -- napalm, automatic weapons, what-have-you -- becomes justified.

"We see Packard’s jaundiced, and unstable view on full display in his arrogant response to photographer, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) when he first meets her. She takes photographs in war, documenting fact. Yet Packard sees her (and the press, by extension) as a threat to him, and to the American people. If only she took photos that supported his viewpoint, maybe the people at home would have supported the Vietnam War better. That’s what he believes. 

"Yet it’s not Mason’s job (or the press’s, actually) to be PR agents supporting a war, or supporting a particular political agenda. It’s the press’s job to question power, and show people the truth. Only fools and failures blame the press for their own shortcomings (web)".  Muir goes in much greater detail than just this, however I think the above quotation gives the reader a decent sense of the general gist of where he's going.  I'd encourage anyone who likes the film to give the entire article a read, as it's really helped me understand a lot of why I'm perhaps prone to liking it so much. 

If there's anything I have to add to it, it's to raise a simple question.  Is all this intentional on Roberts part?  I said a few paragraphs ago that I couldn't help notice a certain literate quality in the way the film was both composed and told.  It can be argued, however, that literacy, the art of being well read or cultivating a good amount of knowledge, isn't the same as knowing what's going to happen in a story as you compose it, whether on the page or screen.  Even if we grant that those themes cited above are what emerge in a natural way from a close reading of the film, the question still remains over whether the director or writer knew it was there as they were making it?

Kong as B-picture Icon.

Stephen King once had something interesting to say about films like this.  It would often happen that he'd make a bad choice, and get stuck watching a Z-level schlock flick like The Horror of Party Beach.  In the middle of all the dreck, however, there would sometime come a moment or plot point which made itself standout by virtue of the fact that there was a lingering level of thematic intelligence to it.  For instance, to take just one example from that Party Beach movie, the film's horror comes about due the the toxic effects of dumping waste into the ocean.  If you can think your way past the convoluted dialogue, cheesy special effects, and meandering plot (which I think is best summed up in a side plot involving two drunks stumbling about the scenery before the monsters take pity on the audience and devour them) you still have to face the fact that at least some kind of message about the devastation wrought by pollution is being made.

It's an interesting nugget of gold hidden in a field of dreck.  However, King cautions the reader to be careful in moments like this.  It is possible, he seems to say, for a bad film to have an interesting message at its core, and never be able to dramatize it in any satisfying way.  That's the fate that befell Party Beach.  King is also convinced that none of it was intentional.  The producers probably never once started out by asking themselves how they could couch an environmental statement in the trappings of the Horror genre.  Instead, their minds were most likely focused on as much green stuffs as they could get at the Drive-In box office, and that's pretty much where all creativity stopped.  All that remained was to pile on a bunch of standard monster rampages on a public beach tropes, throw in some emerging counter-culture elements as sop for the kids, and just turn the whole thing loose on an unsuspecting public.

This, according to King, is how a lot of films like that were made, and how they often continue to be made.  For some reason, however, I think Skull Island is one example where we can afford to be generous.  I think it's possible to say we've got one of the few examples where it turns the director did have a kind of vision in store for his audience.  Not just that, he also seems to have done as much as he could to give it a kind of artistic consideration.  It's this desire to think the project through that allowed him to achieve at least a respectable level of artistic finesse in what could otherwise have been so damn easy to just phone in.  Instead, Roberts treats Kong with respect.  He's the same character most audiences are still lucky enough to know.  However this time, as Muir points out, he gets a chance at last to be a full-fledged hero.  This seems to have all been a more or less deliberate choice on Roberts part.  It's a creative decision that's so small that it's easy for it to walk right by the faces in the aisles without their noticing.  However, it's also seems to be one of those choices that (sometimes, not often) makes the difference between the good and bad B-movie plot.

I don't think many viewers are ever going to quite realize what Roberts has achieved here.  What he's done is more or less take a certain type of film off the shelves, dusted it off, given it a fine new coat of paint, and presented it for our consideration.  The type of film I'm talking goes back to what King said above.  It the kind of flick that was never meant to be first-run.  There used to be a name for the kind movie that Skull Island typified once upon a time.  The best term I can find for it is to just call it the B-picture.  I don't even know if this type exists anymore.  I think the advent of tent-poles pretty much drove the final nail into the sub-genre's collective coffin.  That's a real shame if it should turn out to be true.  I got a real kick out of those cheesy little brats.  At their worst they could, sometimes, be a lot of laughs.  At their best it was possible to call them a legitimate kind of art, even if a lot of others could never see it.

The type of film I'm talking about goes perhaps as far back as the 1930s, though I'd argue it's real glory period started in the 50s and (I hope!) finished up somewhere in the mid-90s.  The B-picture is more or less what it's name implies.  These were not classy prestige flicks like The Piano or How Green was My Valley.  The B-picture is what happens when you take a concept like The Searchers, and then lower the budget down to poverty row levels.  The result may not be upscale, though it remains to be seen if it deserves any scorn.  I know they used to be pretty well liked back in their prime.  I'm just not sure that today's audiences, especially those who have never been aware of films like Casablanca will have developed the mental capacity necessary to enjoy a harmless film such as Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, much less a formerly recognized treasures like Rear Window, or Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

If the B-picture was considered second rate even in it's glory years then it operates under a double handicap now.  While it is true that we now have the technology available to bring all of Hollywood's Golden Age at the beck of our finger-tips, I wouldn't surprised if a contemporary survey of American viewing habits revealed that the majority of the nation's eyes are all mostly limited to the contemporary cinematic products, while half a pint pay a certain nostalgic attention to the films of their youth; i.e. any or at least certain films from the 90s or 80s.  Beyond those decades, it can sometimes appear as if less than a minor sort of attention is paid to the rest of film history.  I'd like to say I wouldn't be bothered by such results if I didn't think they came at a cost.  However, the truth is even if the loss of historical knowledge wasn't a natural detriment to the healthy functioning of society, it would still bug the hell out of me.

This is perhaps a mistake inasmuch as it leaves the great majority of viewers without a vocabulary, and hence a way of looking at or conceiving the nature of the film before them, or even of the world around them.  The latter category is the one that can cause problems for a culture down the road.  It's the kind of problem that doesn't occur to anyone until they are forced to confront it.  In the case of Skull Island, what we've got is a classic kaiju B-picture in the trappings of a modern day blockbuster.  I think it's safe enough to conclude that Roberts has at least enough of a clue to more or less realize what he's doing with the story as he set it all on film.  It's a trait that, as I've said, is able to serve him well.

Conclusion: A Welcome Blast from the Past.

In some ways, I think I prefer this iteration of Kong over the Jackson version.  I think it's down to the respect and understanding Roberts is able to show his material.  He knows he isn't working on an original idea, and the good news is that he welcomes it as something he can work with.  The main way he does it is in how he approaches the film's main character.  It goes something like this.  What you've got is something like a 50 foot giant gorilla.  Why on earth would you not find ways of doing something awesome with such a concept?!  It's a thought that's pretty commonsensical as far as creative logic goes.  The trouble is it's also the sort of thinking that has to fight tooth and nail against a kind of executive stagnation just to make it to the screen.  The fact that Roberts was able to pull it off, and allow Kong to not just be a phoned-in cut-and-paste job means we get to see a King on the screen that manages to live up to the title.  I think the only other time I was entertained this much by the character has to have come from the original 1933 film.  For some reason, he's a character that's difficult to replicate in a satisfying creative way.

The action is fast paced, which means a lot of the interactions between the characters often goes by on a blink and you'll miss it basis.  That's a real problem to be avoided in certain types of stories.  However for some reason it really didn't seem like much of an issue to me here.  That's probably because the narrative's main focus is centered more or less square on the incidents that happen to the characters, making this more a story of event, rather than character study.  It's part of the story's overall motivation.  It's also something that Roberts seems to be aware of for the most part, and he lets it guide him in his creative choices.  In doing this he is able to avoid a big mistake that a lot of other artists make.  Too often directors and writers will pen and shoot a script under a mistaken idea of the kind of genre they are working in.  Just because a story has fantastical elements, that doesn't automatically mean it can just coast by on an auto-pilot of explosions and incidents, unless otherwise specified.  I think the key phrase here is genre literacy.  I don't know whether it makes sense to say that it's a necessary or helpful requirement when it comes to telling a story.  However I am curious to know if perhaps the reason so many directors drop the ball in this part of the playing field is precisely because they just aren't that literate when it comes to storytelling.  The good news is that Roberts seems to know more than a thing or two about the material he's handling.  As a result, a very basic script is elevated to a more engaging level.

The film's creature effects were nothing I was bothered or distracted by.  I don't know that I saw anything original happening on-screen.  I'm sure there are plenty of others out there just waiting to point out how this or that special effect was a total failure that ruins the mood and takes everyone right out of the story.  Even if that's true, it never happened to me.  Besides, I'm kind of at the point where I'm not sure it does much good to complain about that's well on the way to becoming the go-to choice for this kind of picture.  Digital special effects seem more or less here to stay, at least as far as all the tent-poles and franchises are concerned.  The basic rule of thumb there seems to be an either/or choice.  It seems as if we can acclimate ourselves to it, or else just give up on that kind of film.  I'm not real sure just what kind of choices the majority of viewers would make.  I don't even know if it would occur to them that they even have a choice.  Either way, I can't say that I have any real skin in the game.  So there's really nothing else for me it say on it other than that all the Skull Island creatures did what they were supposed to for me.  If there was an air of cheapness about the effects, then I almost want to argue that it's sort of the point for this type of picture.  In that sense, it might be a very under-the-radar homage.

The story's characters, for the most part, are all from the same familiar stick company.  The is best on display in the way the film lays out it's characterization of the figure known as Conrad.  All that we get is a simple statement from John Goodman: "Men go to war in search of something, Mr. Conrad.  If you'd found it, you'd be home by now".  A few clicks further down the road and Conrad pretty much sums up his whole trajectory with a brief backstory speech.  And scene, he's more or less done from then on.  This pattern plays out in more or less the same way for all of the other characters.  The good news is I'm able to report that this does no one any harm.  The screenwriter seemed to have found a way to keep the focus on the action without reducing his figures to a bundle of sticks.  That's a very delicate tightrope walk, and I think a lot of writers tend to fall off when they do it.  The fact that this time it was a success doesn't elevate the film to any grand level.  There will always be stories that were better written than this one.  However, I do think it has to be acknowledged that this type of flick is an example in where it told itself with a certain amount of genuine skill.

It's true that a lot of what happens on the screen can be dismissed as "mere incident".  The trick, however, is that in this sense the film accomplishes what it set out to do.  The filmmakers even decided to let the ending be one big finale riff on the 33 movie's fight between Kong and a T-Rex.  It's not original by any means, and yet somehow, it just seems like the most fitting possible ending for a flick like this.  The reason why goes all the way back to what I said about the type of film we're dealing with here.  The narrative, at it's core, is an old fashioned, late night Creature Feature movie.  It's the kind of flick you or your parents might have been lucky to catch if you managed to stay awake long enough to catch the local late show.  In this way, the whole story is a 50s era throwback dressed up in modern garb.  

If the film isn't original in any way, at least the good news is I was able to walk away thinking I'd seen something enough of the right amount of heart put into it.  The whole thing is a love-letter to the kind of story they just don't tell that much anymore.  Granted, I suppose it's possible to try and make the case that there's a reason this type of film went out of fashion.  To be fair, I kind of get it, at least to an extent.  These days, no one can give any of those old Creature flicks much of any attention unless the crew from Mystery Science Theater is attached as way to ease one into the whole thing.  A lot of it has to do with the way tastes change.  However, sometimes, I can also see why some of them, like Godzilla and the King have endured after all these years.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that if there wasn't at least some bit of staying powers in these old stop-motion and rubber suited monsters, how are we even able to talk about them to this very day.  I also think the same applies to the B-movie in general.  That's a case to make in the near future, however.  Right now, my main hope is that films like this will help others gain a greater interest in the kind of cinematic fare that serves as the primordial material that birthed it.  There's still a lot to say about the value of B level genre movies.  For modern audiences, however, Kong: Skull Island seems like a good enough place to start.