Just back from seeing this. Haven't had this much fun in the cinema since Fury Road, was grinning and laughing most of the time. Kong gets the best introduction, it's beautifully shot, Jackson is giving you exactly what you want from him when seeing his name on the poster, and it was so wonderfully silly and kinda rolled with it. Found it really charming. The music was very lackluster but you can't have it all.
Oh and having only seen Tom in Thor previously, I was surprised at how good looking he is. Gave me some Han Solo vibes (he was introduced in the same way and all) and he had me spellbound in every scene he was in. Perfect choice!
Soap Mactavish
Female Frank West
Steve Brule Kurtz
(Geology PhD) Dr. Dre
Vietnam Vet Eazy-E
Ray "The Fury and also Kurtz" Arnold
Black Mirror Eyeball Guy with Southern Accent
Dan Connor, Conspiracy Theorist
yep... i also thought it worked well because it was unpredictable at parts plus big names die. Music was solid and comedy was good.
It is an action flick with monsters everywhere, so you cant expect character development of an drama, but i thought Jackons and Reillys characters were flashed out pretty well, maybe some 10 extra minutes for Brie and Tom would have worked wonders for long term quality but overall very watchable.
Loved this so much more than I thought I would. Finally, a monster movie that does it right. No over thinking, no plodding, no cock teases, no pitch black rain soaked fight scenes, no endless slow motion. Christ, this was great.
Thought it was amazing. Super Hyped. Some campy moments when it involved people, but Kong is a beast the whole time. Post Credits teaser got me so hyped. I'm so ready.
Oh and for sure there were some funny moments, but the 2 lines that killed me were
"That sounds like a bird, but it's a fucking ant!"
As I was discussing with my friends last night, they made a big deal showing off Kong's speed and agility, and "he's still growing" leads me to believe he'll soon be Godzilla-sized. In Godzilla they made sure to show that he was pretty slow and plodding and needs to build up his atomic breath, so Kong might make a good match for him. They're doing Godzilla: King of the Monsters (which will have Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah) before they do Godzilla vs. Kong, this was more of a set up for that as well as establishing the shared universe, so they can build it up and establish the one-on-one.
That was a fun movie. Time flew by. This is a big-budgeted trashy B-movie that understands it's a big-budgeted trashy B-movie and doesn't try to pretend it's anything else than that. More importantly, it's a movie that knows we're here for the monsters and doesn't waste time giving us that, unlike King Kong 2005 and Godzilla 2014.
I think we are getting a different Godzilla in Godzilla 2, one with a little bit more agility. Once Kong gets tall enough, I don't think he will be as agile as we saw in this film. If we get to see Kong and Rodan on the screen together against Ghidorah that will be nits. What I'm trying to say is I don't want Kong Vs Godzilla only have them in the film, I'm also saying I don't want Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah killed off either. Let Ghidorah fly off to space to return in the next film.
I wouldn't consider Kong to be a great film but it had moments where it was fairly entertaining...mainly the parts where Kong was fucking shit up. The rest...not so much. Barring one or two characters everyone was pretty bland and a bore to watch on screen.
That said, bring on the wacky craziness that will come in the sequels.
John C. Reilly was the acting highlight of the film, along with Jackson, and there was some actual weight to
Reilly's happy ending during the credits. Though you'd think that if MONARCH was recruiting people who were on the mission, that they wouldn't let him go home. You'd think they'd want him more than Hiddleston or Larson; he spent 30 years on that island.
I quite liked the film, overall. I liked the earlier Godzilla film's approach more than many people did, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a boring actor; Skull Island has a much better cast. Even when the characters are mostly not developed much, the actors are charismatic and engaging presences (and the writing gives most of them some identifiable quirk).
Also, the directing/cinematography was very stylish, unlike a lot of major studio blockbusters these days. Sure, a fair bit of that is clearly referencing earlier Vietnam films, but that's still distinctive. And the film is at times shockingly graphic for a PG-13 film, with some of the kills.
Maybe it's because I watched it late last night, but if it wasn't for all the WTF moments every 5 minutes, I probably would have fallen asleep. All of the monsters were awesome, especially the spider.
Overall, it was just what I expected. A fun meh flick.
This was a weird move in mostly bad ways, but there was enough quality monster v monster action to make it fun overall. First the not so great stuff.
There definitely wasn't much to latch onto with the characters, and part of the problem was character bloat. In a way it reminded me of Prometheus, where we had Idris Elba being perfectly excellent as the captain....oh and also there's not one but two co-pilots who serve no role in the story and are given no time to do anything but clutter up scenes. That describes a pretty big swath of the cast here, and the leads all suffer as a result.
I was shocked at how little I cared when Goodman's character got munched out of nowhere. It should have been a gut punch moment, and instead I was like, huh. They killed him awfully early. Oh well.
In fairness, most of them do what they were asked, but they just didn't have much to work with. Jackson and Riley had the meatiest roles, with Riley being the only one in the entire film to build a fully realized character out of the script. Hiddleson brings some charm to a role that didn't ask him to do much else but be the charming voice of reason. And to point in what direction for the cast to walk a half dozen times.
There are some incredibly weird and jarring time jumps late in the film.
Hiddleston and the photographer go to figure out what direction the river is, and it's daytime. Cut to the dead of night and Jackson is baiting Kong, then cut back to Hiddleston and co. climbing a bluff to spot the river. How many hours were they climbing?
Then the big lizard shows up, beats Kong down, and chases them into the jungle, still in the dead of night. They come out by the river at dawn. Did it take them six hours or something to find the river that was right next to them, with the big bad chasing them the whole time? WTF
But the biggest issue I had was with the style and tone of the film, which was just all over the place. Take the sequence where
the newly regrouped characters are working their way through the mass grave of Kong's family. It starts out as a realistic, boots on the ground scene, as they're hiding from the big lizard creature. Then we get cartoon action as Hiddleston dons a gas mask and goes all super hero in slow motion with a katana, cutting CG flying monsters. We get a random first person shot from the gas mask, then a really jarring shot of one of the birds filling the frame before getting cut in half to reveal Hiddleston bursting toward the camera. (Then he takes the mask off. Why did only he need it, and only for that sequence?)
Then we get big Jurassic Park type of action, as the photographer is running toward the camera and flopping around dodging a big CG monster. (I may have the order of those last two mixed up.)
Which is it? Pick one and own it, but cycling through all three in the same scene was utterly jarring, and there was no sense of escalation to it. The director just picked what he thought looked cool in the moment, to hell with cohesion. Nearly every action scene in the film goes through the same kind of uncomfortable juggling.
Same kind of issues with the humor in the film. There was a lot of VERY uneven laughter in the theater, because they just couldn't land the comic timing. Like, at all. I thought it was hilarious when
the guy did the big self-sacrifice to blow up the big bad from inside only to get swatted and blown up on the cliff, but I was literally the only one in a full theater to laugh. (My daughter smirked a bit.) The film alternated so hard from playing it straight to including slapstick that what should have been a hysterical tension breaker whiffed.
The monster shit though? There was some great stuff there. Kong vs. everything was great.
I loved that we got to see him actually moving around the island, being the enforcer of order he's said to be. How he crushes and snacks on the big octopus, plucking tentacles off like we might pluck raspberries from a bush. King soaking up the lights in the sky at night. The action is filled with moments like when he looks at the anchor wrapped around the ship's propeller and goes, hmmm.
Just great stuff all the way through.
All the homages to the original Kong worked well.
Breaking out of the chains, starting to pull the lizard's jaws apart. I loved the shot of him plucking the photographer out of the water, even if we all saw it coming a mile away.
My daughter and I went together and she said it was a solid 7/8 if you turn your brain off and watch the action, but much lower if you try to actually dissect anything. That's about where I land as well. I went in hoping for good monster action, and got it, but that's about all.
Movie was okay, found it entertaining enough, but not as great as I hoped it would be. There is definitely too many characters, and the movie doesn't know how to handle them all correctly.
Kong himself was great and a bad ass, but I'm surprised I keep hearing he had so many great monster fights, there wasn't nearly enough imo.
Lets see, Kong fights two little Skull Crawlers for like 15 seconds, then a 35 second struggle with the squid and then finally the pretty cool and satisfying final fight against the bigger Skull Crawler. If they could have just expanded the previous 2 fights some more, I would have been happier.
Not really a spoiler, but just in case.
Did anyone else notice the possible nod to Metal Gear Solid? the boat built on the island was named Gray Fox. I wouldn't have thought it was a direct reference but the director is trying to get a MGS movie made and has talked about it recently.
Movie was two movies jammed into one. One half was Peter Jackson's Kong, the other half was Apocalypse now. Should have just combined the groups, removed the girl, and stuck with a sort of Apocalypse now with SLJ and Kong.
does it imply only Godzilla fights King Gidorah? I seriously hope they don't pull this "every kaiju gives their life force on Godzilla to defeat Gidorah"
The irritating Black Mirror dude in the faux Southern accent, the Chinese character inserted only to say something "intelligent and meaningful" in order to make Chinese sponsors happy and then...fall in love with the black guy for..what reason again? Hiddleston was also bland and phoning it in...I can't even remember what his characters name was now actually :/
That being said, the lighting was amazing, especially the rich red/blues of the scene where they recruited Hiddleston and the jungle greens/browns/yellow~
I know that people expect good characters in a movie they watch but I don't think I've seen one kaiju movie in my 37 tears on this earth were there was one memorable character. You watch giant monster films for giant monsters.
I seriously did not give people the credit for knowing what happened in the post credit scene. There was a bunch of excitement in the air, but when this was shown.
Edit: nvm, I obviously can't figure out how to wrap an image in a spoiler.
I know that people expect good characters in a movie they watch but I don't think I've seen one kaiju movie in my 37 tears on this earth were there was one memorable character. You watch giant monster films for giant monsters.
I seriously did not give people the credit for knowing what happened in the post credit scene. There was a bunch of excitement in the air, but when this was shown.
Edit: nvm, I obviously can't figure out how to wrap an image in a spoiler.
Saw it last night. It was a fun movie, though I was expecting more monsters for some reason. Only really six different types, and that's including the buffalo. Kicking myself that I didn't stick around to see what the after credits thing.
So for the cave paintings of Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah, did they look more or less like their classic incarnations?
What was up with the editing? Scenes seemed to jump all over the place continually with very little continuity between them. Felt like the movie was originally three hours long and they trimmer it down to two very late in the process.
