- Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
- Writers: Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein
- Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 58 Minutes
Synopsis
In 1944, two pilots crash on an island. They fight, but their fight is interrupted by a giant gorilla. Time passes as credits roll. We stop advancing in 1973.
Nixon is on the news, and he says the war is ending. Bill Randa and Houston Brooks go to see the senator to get financing for an expedition to Skull Island, a place found by a new satellite. He thinks there are some very unusual creatures there. If we don’t find out what’s there, the Russians are going to get it first.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam Colonel Packard is not happy that his job is nearly over. He’s put in charge of transporting the scientists to Skull Island. Randa hires James Conrad to go along with them as a tracker and guide. Mason Weaver is a photographer who worked in the war. Finally, they have all their people and they set sail. There’s a mission briefing that sounds very military.
Randa and Brooks know more than they’re telling about what’s on the island. The helicopters take off for the island. It’s all fun and games until someone throws a palm tree at one of the copters. Another is ripped from the sky by Kong. The copters surround him and open fire, which enrages him. Before long, they’re all out of copters, and Colonel Packard is not a happy man.
Randa is with Packard and the soldiers, and he explains that he works for Monarch, an organization that hunts for these giant monsters. There’s talk about the Hollow Earth theory, where ancient monsters live inside the Earth and can only come out where the crust is thin, like on Monster Island. They encounter several other oversized creatures and fight some of them.
Conrad and Weaver’s group find Hank Marlowe, the much-older soldier from the pre-credit sequence, and he’s made friends with the local native tribes. The natives show them a diorama of their protectors, of which King is the last one. They all fear the “skull crawlers,” big lizard things. Kong is angry because the copter’s bombs woke up a bunch of them. Kong is the only thing keeping “the big one” down. Marlowe laughs at their plan to get to the north end of the island in three days.
Randa has a talk with Packard, as he doesn’t want to hurt Kong. Packard, however, is out for revenge. Marlowe has a boat made from old airplane parts, and he wants to take Conrad’s group to the extraction point. The two groups eventually hook up and go in search of Chapman, who we saw die quite a while ago. Randa is eaten by a giant two-legged possum-faced lizard which starts one of those one-damned-thing-after-another battles.
The two groups split up again, the civilians headed back to the boat and the soldiers gearing up to fight Kong. Packard’s got a Captain Ahab thing going on, and it’s obviously not going to work out well for him. Conrad, Weaver, and Marlowe go back to save Kong. They knock Kong out, but then “The Big One” attacks. Kong fights the lizard while the humans rush back to the boat.
Kong wins his fight and the humans leave the island. As the closing credits roll, we get to see Marlowe returned to his family after 29 years on the island. In the after-credit sequence, we see the people from Monarch and watch old footage from Godzilla. Kong wasn’t the only King out there. We hear Godzilla roar.
Commentary
The monsters look good, the special effects are great, but everything has a yellow/gray filter over it to give everything a washed-out 1970s look. Why do directors all think the past had a color scheme? The beginning is interesting, the middle drags a lot; the stuff on the island should be more interesting than it is.
Overall, it’s a much more modern reboot that simply telling the original story over again. The Vietnam war was an interesting era, if not particularly one of the more fun times in history. This film would eventually tie in with both 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and 2021’s “Godzilla vs. Kong.”