‘Kong: Skull Island’ review: The creature feature, evolved

While Kong: Skull Island may not have a bigger debut than Godzilla, it may have more longevity at the box office and have a better overall run at the box office, but we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve seen the film and am happy to report it’s a fantastic ride.

Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, and starring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Toby Kebbell, Tom Wilkinson, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, and John C. Reilly, Kong: Skull Island opens in the United Kingdom and U.S. on March 10, 2017.

Skull Island is where a team of archaeologists come across King Kong. While Peter Jackson’s ape was a 25-foot-tall silverback gorilla, this Kong, brought to life by creature designer Carlos Huante and ILM’s visual effects supervisors Stephen Rosenbaum and Jeff White, hearkens back to the anthropomorphic design from the 1933 film, with exaggerated proportions and an anatomically updated physique. “I try and find some sort of meditative hobby to do on set and it’s different for every film”, Larson said in a statement. Thanks to Google’s advertising efforts, it looks like the movie might just get a strong opening worldwide! If someone says stay out of an area or don’t do this, maybe you should listen to them.

The good news is that “Kong: Skull Island” is a very solid reboot.

The movie is a follow-up to the 1933 classic “King Kong” and the 2005 remake by Peter Jackson, which was also attractive and inventive and twice as long as this one.

And he’s far from the scariest creature on Skull Island – our adventurers also meet up with killer birds, enormous insects, creepy-crawlers that masquerade as driftwood, and enormous dinosaurlike creatures that appear to be in the throes of indigestion.

Hiddleston and Larson are fine playing it straight, but Kong really cooks when it embraces a kooky B-movie style. Randa wants scientific proof that he’s not a crackpot for thinking giant beasts live underneath the ground, while Packard wants to kill Kong as payback for the deaths of his men and, by extension, for the war that his side just lost. Unfortunately, there’s not much chemistry between the two, and both are saddled with some of the film’s worst lines; conversations about how unsafe places are also the most handsome and war is hell are needless when we’re presented with these ideas in a convincingly visual manner. Ahead of that, reviews for the film have started to show up.