#fun fact the very first image was edited on a shitty photo editor which is why its so blurryOO I CANT ITS OS BAAD DF IM CRINGING | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

martinhalldin-blog · 7 years

Text

Kong: Skull Island Review

Here’s a little disclaimer before you continue reading this review. I enjoyed my time watching this movie. I liked it as a pop-corn-flick because of its effects and progression story-wise, though I did not like it as a fleshed out, well-crafted movie. I think you know the difference between the two. If you don’t then I strongly suggest you skip this review. I will most likely de-tour a lot and ramble quite a bit. If you can deal with that, thank you. Now let’s get on with it!

Spoilers ahead!!! Read at your own risk!!!

I first off want to talk a little bit about the good things in this movie, because credit where credit is due, this movie was entertaining from beginning till the end. It’s got humor, very hit or miss, but humor nonetheless. It’s got action scenes which were all done extremely well. I don’t think there’s a single action scene in this movie I ever thought was boring or uninteresting. Handled with care, the scenes in which we see King Kong we’re all beautiful. I love the homage to classic action flicks were the heat is distorting the image, making it look wavy, while helicopters are flying towards the sunset with rock-music playing in the background. it seems to me like the filmmakers were trying t make a fun movie more than they were trying to make a deep philosophical drama about the existence of unknown creatures living o earth. But that is also why this movie is as horribly flawed as it is. And here is why:

Pacing. Oh god the pacing. As I said, one thing I really have to give this movie is that it is really good at keeping your interest. There are few scenes were you’re out-right bored which I see as a strength because if there weren’t a lot of action scenes this movie would be boring as all hell. This doesn’t play to the movies advantage though since it got very messy during some scenes. The longest shot (coincidentally it was during an action-sequence) lasted for a whooping 11 seconds… 11… Fuck me if that isn’t on the verge of being a little too long for our precious audience to handle. Who needs good framing, and in that pacing, when we can use cuts to emphasize… I don’t fucking know… how urgent the whole situation is? I mean the characters are stuck on an island full of fantastical creatures never before known to man. Some of them are extremely dangerous and they need to get away from these beasts. Maybe the editors wanted to put us in the characters shoes by never showing anyone for more than a second, because it’s not the characters that’s the stars of this show. It’s fucking King Kong baby, and he is literally everywhere in this god forsaken movie.

The sad part about all of this is the fact that they’ve got some amazing shots in this movie that could have been so great, but they cut those parts out so fast that nothing ever feels fantastical. It just seems rushed. No less does the lack of interesting camera angles help. There’s a scene in the movie were, after just crashing on the island, the crew is venturing out into the wilderness to get to the north side of the island. They then stumble upon a gigantic bison-looking animal. They all stand still, fearing that the creature would attack. But Tom, the brave soul that he is, tells everyone to calm down. The bison creature turns out to be friendly and just wants to eats it’s grass in peace, and so it leaves. This could have been a great first introduction to what this island has to offer, but this scene was so hastily edited it looses all sense of awe that I was feeling during that moment. It’s actually sad because I know that behind all the curtains there is a great movie somewhere. But making a movie too long would scare off a big audience and devoting too much time towards the characters would have taken a lot of time away from what the audience wants to see in a big block-buster movie like this. The creature in the title, the trailers, on the posters, and literally everywhere else. This isn’t so much a fault of this movie in particular, more so the general style of a movie like this. But because this movie has still got these issues I’m counting it as a flaw nonetheless.

Characters, or lack thereof. Characters are extremely weak. I remember Tom Hiddleston’s character being a navigator of sorts. But he never fucking does his job. I remember him saying “Damn I’m so smart I’m just going to fucking point towards the dangerous parts of this island because it’s the quickest way of getting to wherever the fuck. We need to further this plot and if we can’t have an excuse to show more of King Kong because we know people got disappointing to not see any of Godzilla in his movie, we just need to head in King Kong’s direction because I am the navigator and I need things to do. I’m not being payed to do jack shit even though that is exactly what I fucking do.” But I could be remembering things wrong...

Brie Larson being a photographer (and unlike Tom’s character, she does her fucking job). She takes photos of whatever, anything and everything. I don’t remember her ever doing anything else though. She made the tribes people do the fucking peace sign for a photo, which was hysterical, comedical genius. People who’ve never seen a god damn camera before needs to pose for a photo she needs to take and do the fucking peace sign. I can’t see this being in the movie other than for comedic relief. If this is what her character decided to do upon meeting a civilization unknown to the rest of the world then I will consider her a stupid cunt who needs to lay off her shit. Because that is nothing like what a rational human being would do in a situation like the one the characters are in.

Samuel L Jacksson’s character is an army man who hates King Kong because Samuel L Jacksson flew with his team onto Skull Island and got attacked by King Kong, because the fucking army guys shot him, and so him and his team got mushed to shit by the gigantic ape, being the beast that he is. Who the fuck are you to be pissed off when you strike first and then gets shit for it. His piss-poor excuse for a character makes no sense to me because the only thing that drives him to do anything in this movie is his urge to kill King Kong. I get that you can’t flesh out all characters in a satisfying way for a two hour long movie like this, but there is no depth. I guess you could argue that his motivation to kill King Kong isn’t just fueled by his hatred towards him, but also because of his desire to get home. But that could also be said about any character in this movie. Everybody wants to get back home.

And for the last character I really want to bring up is Tian Jing’s character San. Why is she in the movie? What is she if not padding? She talks… Which is great I guess, but she doesn’t add anything to the movie, not as a character nor an actor. Walking out of the theater I was on the verge of laughing just thinking about how nothing the character was. The way they showed her in the first few scenes had me thinking she was going to be a major role, maybe not of the same rank as Tom or Brie’s characters, but still important to the progression of the story. But no. She is literally just there, doing whatever it is her character does. Amazing.

The rest of the cast, John C. Reilly and Toby Kebbell for example, we’re okay for the most part. They played their roles nicely and was actually giving a somewhat decent performance. Most of the cast was, too bad none of them could get a chance to stick out because no time was spent developing their characters because they needed time to show off how cool and exciting King Kong and other animals on this island are.

Enough ranting about characters, let’s move on to something even better:

Tone, the one thing a movie like this desperately needs. This movie has no idea what tone it wants to settle for. Now I know that a movie can have multiple tones and switch between them. Many great movies has done that successfully. Just look at The Trueman Show blending comedy and drama for example. But this movie is trying very hard to be a mix between an intense action packed dark-drama, comedy, and a monster-feature. There was one scene in the beginning of the movie were the research team flies in on skull island, meeting King Kong for the first time, and the fucking nerve the writers have to murder basically everyone but the main characters in one of the most intense and brutal helicopter scenes I’ve seen in recent years, and one of the fucks in the helicopter asks “Is that a monkey?” HOLY FUCK THE OBSERVATION SKILLS YOU’VE GOT DISPOSABLE ARMY MAN #23. Yes it fucking is, team of writers, making the script for fucking King Kong, the most famous ape since that one that got shot in the zoo a few months back. (God bless you, sweet child.) I honestly admire the team of writers who can come up with this shitty excuse of a “joke” and the nerve it must have taken to put it into the final product. No shame.

I can’t get over the fucking deaths in this movie. This connects nicely with tone because again, this movie fails to jump between being a dark-drama and a comedy. The writers seem to be unaware of one huge and important aspect of any movie: timing. If you nail the timing, you’re making good shit. When a character dies in this movie they all have to fucking blurt out a shitty one-liner. “oh fuck…” or “god dammit…” are only a few examples. Why do they all do this before dying? If it’s for a joke then you can’t repeat the same kind for joke for every major death because it’s extremely lazy. Repetition kills humor.

Where are they? Whenever there’s a scene… like… any, there’s a noticeable haze around each character. That haze is what we professionals call “shit green/blue-screening”. Was all of this movie shot in one studio somewhere in Hollywood? Probably not. There were some jungle scenes and some shots inside a temple that all looked like it was recorded on a real location. Though with the amount of processing on the imagery it’s hard to tell. It looks nice, but not necessarily convincing.

Oh my god the music. Why? Why… Omg why go from diegetic to nondiegetic music in your action movie if you’re not going to do anything interesting with the concept? Swiss Army Man had the characters start going “DAA, DA DA DA DAAH” from nowhere and they built the entire fucking soundtrack around that. It was incredibly executed and worked really well for the tone of the film. In this movie though, some guy starts a record player and that is now playing clear as day in the background of a shot, for entire scenes in some instances. It’s not a huge problem, it’s just not interesting enough to put as much emphasis on as they are in the movie. And if they didn’t show so many god damn record-players being started, I wouldn’t have cared enough to bring it up. But they did, and so did I.

Not to mention the songs they used. This could easily have been written in the “tone” paragraph but I think it fits better here. Here’s a short list of songs they decided to license for this film:

The Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Run Through the Jungle

The Stooges - Down On The Street

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

I know that these songs brings back a sense of nostalgia for the 70’s, and it certainly did for me, but when comparing it to what the movie was showing you they just don’t fit at all. Were some scenes shows you death and chaos, other scenes will be happy-go-lucky with these songs playing. Like wtf. It’s such a harsh contrast between what would realistically be going on during a situation like this. The group of people you are with are the only ones left after the attacks of King Kong, you wont make it three days without being killed by whatever could be out there in the wild, and the songs they choose to play over these scenes are… these… I dont’ know. I just think you should be more considerate when picking songs for your movies. Either you make your movie more lighthearted and not as dark, or keep it as is and use more fitting music. Although i see this more as a preferred taste than anything. Subjectivity is always important when it comes to movies, but I still feel it is important to give your two cents on something that is so mish-mash as this movie honestly is.

Other minor gripes. Where the ever living fuck did King Kong come from in the scene with the bison creature? Brie Larson’s character should have, not only heard King Kong walking up to the hurt bison creature, but she would also have fucking seen him walk up from behind the bison, seeing as King Kong is “the size of a building” in the word of the one army fuck earlier in the movie. I’d expect King Kong to fucking sound like one as well. There were no sound building up to his appearance, except for his roar right before the camera pans up towards him.

Why were the tribes people not explored more? We were taught about the gods they believe in, the fact that they don’t talk too much, they share their land and we can see on them that they’ve got some kind of body-paint covering most of their bodies. But we aren’t sure about how they communicate with one another. We have no clue how they’ve managed to stay alive in an environment at hostile as Skull Island for so long, when an army is wiped out in a heart-beat. It’s something I would have loved for them to have elaborated a bit more on. I was genuinely interested in knowing more about their existence.

Fuck the scene were John Ortiz’s character get’s taken away by monster birds and eaten right in front of the rest of the cast. There’s literally no reason for it to happen. There were no signs of the birds catching up on them. There was barely any reaction from the other characters, more than a “He’s gone, nothing to say.” by John C. Reilly’s character. They then swiftly move on to the next scene. Was his character so uninteresting to the writers that they just wanted to kill him off without ever expanding on who he is, how he’s feeling, what he’s thinking? I mean I can only assume they killed him off because there was literally nothing else for him to do in the movie. He didn’t say much, nor did he do much. I guess I see why they did it, but I don’t agree with it. Not one bit because the scene is dumb and the characters are awful for barely giving a shit about it.

Final thoughts! Oh my god this fucking movie. Even though it is cheesy, filled with death and destruction, rock music, and everything that could be considered “cool”, it’s still got its fair share of flaws. But i honestly kind of likes it. It’s like the room, just not as unintentionally bad and not as unintentionally funny. I could totally see myself seeing this with friends again some day, when we’re bored and just want something fun to watch. But I cant see myself digging deeper into what this movie has got to offer story-wise. It’s got great ideas, like the underground spaces they kept bringing up throughout the movie. It’s just a little sad that that idea wasn’t utilized at all. And it’s sad that things that I could have seen being made into this movie were cast aside for other ideas. But it turned out okay in the end. Okay.

——

See it for laughs. Not for substance.

4 / 10

——

#king kong #skull #island #king #kong #movie #review #spoilers

1 note · View note