Colonizing Cameras

By and large, "Kong: Skull Island" does a fair job at realizing what the King Kong franchise got right in the first place in 1933. The people who enter Skull Island are colonialists and cinematography and photography are among their weapons, while Kong is the visual-effects marvel of a monster-as-movie to be captured and released back upon the "civilized" world. In this case, he's but one American movie among an entire legion of Japanese kaiju in the so-called Monsterverse. The after-credits scene actually works well in this regard.

Quite the cross-fertilization the Monsterverse has with the template cinematic universe of the MCU, what with borrowing Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as John C. Reilly, I guess, and returning them afterwards with interest in the form of Brie Larson. And, this is on top of the would-be Maximoff twins making out in the first Monsterverse entry, "Godzilla" (2014). Even compared to Loki, Fury and Captain Marvel, though, their characters here are thin. An amoral mercenary, a warmonger commander, an "anti-war" photojournalist and some obsessed monster hunters, OK and what else is there to flesh them out as characters? Oh, that's it. Only Reilly holds some interest as to what will happen to him, providing both the picture's comic relief and, besides the giant ape created in computers, the emotional center that one might've thought would be occupied by Hiddleston and Larson, but they'd be wrong. Meanwhile, Jackson goes superficial "Apocalypse Now" (1979) levels of insane, while other familiar faces, like John Goodman or Richard Jenkins, are wasted.

Other than a bunch of CGI fighting, including some quite good shots of Kong's confrontation with the helicopters, the filmmakers did well to have a couple of their characters equipped with cinematographic and photographic cameras--making them the on-screen surrogate filmmakers in addition to being hollow characters. Unlike the 1933 original, we don't get the surrogate spectators of New York being attacked by the monster from the stage, although there's a reference to Kong's being chained before that here. At least, as all the dialogue makes very clear, the picture acknowledges its metaphor of Vietnam War type imperialist folly and in Kong's eternal battle with the lizards the ecological importance of predators. And, on that last account, is the main fantasy of these giant monster movies: that people may be held in check by not being the apex predator. Kong is just a movie, though--he doesn't exist, but there are plenty of Colonel Packards to go around letting loose skull crawlers, or whatever you want to call it.