I Watch Films: Kong: Skull Island
Fortunately I will never be part of an air assault unit, but in common with many people who saw Apocalypse Now at an impressionable age I have a track I would play while riding helicopters into battle. Oh, alright, I had an entire playlist at one time. So I can say that Black Sabbath's Paranoid is a perfectly good choice for a unit being dragged out of the tail end of the Vietnam War to explore the mysterious Skull Island that has just been discovered by satellite.
Skull Island is, inevitably, inhabited by giant monsters, is surrounded by a static storm and cut off from the outside world, and is also an entrance to the Hollow Earth.
The film has a fine cast who mostly play a bunch of stock characters. John Goodman's character was the only survivor of a US Navy ship's encounter with a monster who wants to find out what's going on. Brie Larson is the anti-war photographer who takes a lot of photos and rescues a giant water buffalo (proving to Kong she's not bad). Samuel L Jackson is the obsessed helicopter squadron commander who is determined not to lose another war; he has the requisite intensity for the role, but haven't we seen this type of character a lot? John C Reilly is Marlow, who crashed on the island during WW2 and has a fabulous beard and a bunch of necessary exposition. Finally Tom Hiddleston is the former SAS captain brought in as a tracker. He's called (sigh) Conrad**. And he's dapper. That's okay I guess, a dapper action hero in a time when the role is more often rugged and unshaven but is that all there is to the twist? Well then.
Anyway, Kong (a giant gorilla in case you didn't know) is pretty good, fighting the helicopters is excellent, fighting other monsters is fun, there's a few good jokes. Better than most monster movies, though not as interesting as a really bad one.
Watch This: Because it has a giant gorilla in it.
Don't Watch This: If you don't like giant gorillas.
Also: I don't know what my first Kong film was for sure, but either Son of Kong (with Little Kong) or the 1976 King Kong, which has a slightly less interesting Kong vs helicopters fight.
*Unless you count John Wick Chapter 2, which you might as I started watching it at 2345 on New Year's Eve, so it was certainly the first film I finished watching this year. In brief: John Wick was a superior revenge story, held together with (in order) Keanu Reeves' magnetic screen charisma, a fine supporting cast, a secret crime-world background in which Wick is an almost mythological character, Wick's dog and some well choreographed action set pieces. Chapter 2 digs into the crime-world background, which is extremely stylish and almost as cool as it thinks it is, the dog lives, I enjoyed it a lot, and I feel that it was slightly unsatisfying to have a sequel to the very complete story of the original.
** Look up Joseph Conrad, Marlow, Heart of Darkness, the 2005 King Kong, Apocalypse Now, then realise it's just a shout out and doesn't have any real meaning to it.
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