kong: skull island, or welcome to the jungle
in which we gotta get out of this place
In the year 1899, Joseph Conrad wrote the literary classic Heart of Darkness, a novella in which the protagonist, Marlow, journeys through colonial Africa in search of Kurtz, a trader who has “gone native” and rules various native tribes with an iron fist, eventually going mad in the process. He’s an avatar of imperial arrogance in believing it can control territories and peoples it barely understands.
A little under eight decades later, Frances Ford Coppola, coming off the generational successes of the first two Godfather films, picked his next project - a script by John Milius that heavily reworked Conrad’s story and transplanted it to the Vietnam War, in which Kurtz became a renegade colonel fighting his own war in the jungle, pursued by Martin Sheen’s Lieutenant Willard, the Marlow analogue.
Both stories are regarded as some of the best in their form, defining the fin-de-siecle and post-Vietnam eras perfectly in their explorations of colonialism, interventionism and the brutality of war.
Anyway, about forty years after all that, somebody in a Hollywood office decided that the story could do with a big fucking monkey being in it.
Welcome to Kong: Skull Island. The horror, the horror!
King Kong turns 91 this year. Steady on, old man!
While Godzilla is a foreign creation imported to America, Kong is an American creation whose importation occurs in the text himself. The original 1933 film introduces foggy Skull Island as a mythical and primitive home for Kong before transporting him across to America, where he’ll invade the urban space of New York and swat planes out of the sky on top of the Empire State like you remember.
Kong is, in essence, a kind of noble savage - honourable in intent, but unable to communicate past his outwardly monstrous appearance, except for one benevolent white woman who is able to see through to who he really is. While stories like these do push back against the prejudice of judging based on appearance, it’s still the case that the appearance is objectively daunting and an obstacle to acceptance. After all, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, an obvious Kong analogue, has to become a good-looking regular guy to get his happy ending. As parables of tolerance, it rarely works to make the marginalised into misunderstood monsters.
All of this will become relevant later.
The ensuing Kong franchise wound up being a great deal less consistent and prolific than his Japanese counterpart, even as it predated Godzilla by two decades. Studio RKO cranked out Son of Kong in record time, making for the second Kong movie of 1933 nine months later, but the sequel didn’t take off in the public imagination.
The next appearance would be in the opportunistic Godzilla crossover in 1962, which would be fuel for another Toho co-produced Kong entry a few years later, but again, the franchise failed to launch. In 1976, the series returned to brass tacks with a same-name direct remake, which would take ten years to spawn another sequel. This time, Kong would go dark for almost twenty years, before a Kiwi director coming off a generational hit fantasy trilogy decided it would make for a good follow-up to his magnum opus.
G’day, Peter, or whatever the Kiwi equivalent is of that.
A huge fan of the original, Jackson had actually started work on King Kong in the mid-90s, co-writing a script with frequent collaborator/wife Fran Walsh, before development stalled out amid concerns about how naff the big monster genre was becoming (including our very own Godzilla ‘98!).
Then Jackson’s career took what the business calls “a good turn”. He decamped to New Zealand for several years, made The Lord of the Rings, and became one of the most successful blockbuster filmmakers in history. His industry cachet now at approximately 100,000, Jackson cashed in his post-Rings blank cheque to defibrillate his Kong script, which would (in rewritten form) make its way to cinemas in December 2005 as a lavish, mega-budget remake with a 190-minute run-time. It’s the sort of thing you can only make if you made three of the best movies in history and flipped them for both an insane profit and record awards haul.
As it turned out, Kong ‘05 was neither an embarrassing boondoggle for Jackson, nor a true coronation moment for him. It did well, if not spectacularly, and it was reviewed well, if not rapturously. As a cultural object, it’s neither really here nor there these days, more a monument to Jackson’s toast-of-the-town status in a pre-Hobbit world than an object of real interest.
(I haven’t seen it myself. Fuck you.)
That’s where we come in. Most relevantly for our purposes, King Kong wasn’t enough of a smash success to really revitalise the franchise. A potential sequel was one of those muttered-about “maybe someday” possibilities that will never really happen yet which fuelled the film blog world of the late 2000s and early 2010s, like, say, Tron 3.
That’s a joke, reader. That’s a little joke. I know that they’re making a third Tron. I know they hired one of the guys from the Pirates of the Caribbean legacy sequel that nobody liked to direct it, and I know that Jared Leto is the lead. Can you let me have my little jokes?
As it turned out, one of those little development hell cul-de-sacs for Kong 2 involved the hiring of Adam Wingard, a director we will revisit quite soon. Funny.
In 2014, Legendary hit the reboot button on a Kong project initially involving Universal. The snag was that it hadn’t been all that long since the Jackson movie, and appetite for just another Kong movie was, potentially, quite limited.
Hmm. What could be done about that, we ask?
Let us return to the realms of factual history.
The Vietnam War lasted almost twenty years, with major American involvement taking place for about nine of them. It was a generational folly, a bloodthirsty proxy war whose impacts spread to neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, and a gigantic strike against the notion of American military hegemony.
America lost, and America hated that it lost. It’s no wonder that the war stuck like a tick in the nation’s psyche, and that waves of Vietnam films from Apocalypse Now to Platoon to Full Metal Jacket revisited and refined the American story of Vietnam. This trend tracked all the way through the late sixties to the very end of the eighties, as the Vietnam generation processed the atrocities that they had both witnessed and perpetrated.
Vietnam films never fully died out, but it’s pretty clear that, by the turn of the 21st century, popular culture had broadly moved on. A film like Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, which brings MAGA hats to the jungle, is a considerable exception rather than the rule. Creedence Clearwater-pumping period pieces had been lapped by the more comforting neon of eighties nostalgia.
It sounds crass to say it, but there’s an easy enough explanation for this: Vietnam isn’t fun. It is impossible to spin it as fun. Even helicopters triumphantly swiping through the air to the blasts of “Ride of the Valkyries” is just a route towards a story about a colonialist freak going insane in the jungle. The Vietnam war traumatised a generation of Americans, and they were the ones who got to go home to a country that wasn’t on fucking fire. A war like that is easier to forget.
Kong: Skull Island gives it a go anyway.
Does the phrase “Vietnam chic” make you want to throw yourself from a glacier? I get it, really, but I don’t have a better one to describe what this is. Kong: Skull Island is Vietnam chic.
The first act, in particular, is purely a blender of Vietnam-era cultural memory. From the moment that John Goodman steps out from a car amidst a Watergate protest and proclaims that “there will never be a more screwed up time in Washington” almost winking to camera (remembering that this came out in March 2017), it is clear that Skull Island is less dealing with the real history and more with a gestalt memory of what that time looked like in popular culture.
Then the film segues into what is actively and consciously an Apocalypse Now redux, aping (ha) almost every iconic aspect of that film’s visuals, and ladling on the Kurtz vibes with Samuel L Jackson’s army character so thickly that it’s a wonder that the word “horror” never escapes the guy’s mouth. Just look at that visual above. Look at it.
Hard to forget the needle drops, either, with the soundtrack working its way through “Bad Moon Rising”, “Paranoid”, “Run Through the Jungle” and “Time Has Come Today”. It’s a real Now That’s What I Call Vietnam playlist, comprised of the most obvious possible choices at every turn for maximum recognisability. Just said they already used “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” in the trailers, really.
(Older readers may remember Thor: Love and Thunder summoning the spirit of 80s glam rock by using the four most streamed Guns n’ Roses songs on Spotify. This is a long and storied tradition we’re talking about.)
Vietnam chic.
Two questions, then. To what end is all of this being done, and is it necessarily a bad thing that Kong: Skull Island is Vietnam chic?
Well, let’s answer the second first. No, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Rewatching this movie, it was hard to avoid the sense that, actually, this is exactly the kind of IP blockbuster that we want Hollywood to be making, if IP blockbusters want to be made. Franchise entries with a distinct aesthetic and original setting are gold dust in a world of generic New York-esque landscapes being smashed to pieces.
By setting itself in 1973, and drenching itself in all these very obvious pop culture signifiers of the era, Skull Island immediately comes out of the gates with a take on the source material that feels unusual and pointed and ripe with potential. All that portentous meaning that Godzilla ‘14 strained for, with its vague reminiscence of Fukishima and 9/11-esque disaster-scapes, is available to this movie on a platter.
Vietnam is the story of an empire interfering where it shouldn’t. That’s the basic logline of any King Kong movie.
There are hold-ups here, mind you. Really, it’s the hold-up that any big monster movie with metaphors on its mind has to face - by bringing real tragedy into conversation with big computer-generated beasties, there are a few risks to all of that. Vietnam was, as mentioned, not a pleasant episode in history. We can yak on about empires overreaching, but the human devastation is what really mattered - and that devastation was depthless.
It’s not inherently a bad idea to attempt this kind of storytelling. Godzilla, after all, came from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It just means that you have to have a good reason to bring all of this up, and a clear destination for where you want to take it.
In other words, Skull Island’s Vietnam chic needed to have a point other than making us remember stuff.
So…
… about that “having a point”.
Okay, let’s give it a fair hearing. Skull Island has an idea of what it wants to say about Vietnam.
Most of this comes through the character of Packard, played by Samuel L. Jackson, the aforementioned Kurtz type. Packard’s whole deal is that he’s fuming about the Vietnam peace accords and wants another chance to fight the war and win, so Kong becomes his latest obsession in that vein. Packard is the incarnation of the American refusal to lose, and its bloodthirstiness even when faced with peace. He’s the film’s antagonist more than Kong is, because he’s the one disturbing the peace.
This is something we can work with! There’s a critique there that’s relevant to the setting about the dangers of American interference, which is something you could reasonably build a film like this around.
Except it’s not just that. Skull Island’s Monsterverse obligations necessitate the inclusion of Monarch, a group the universe has never successfully defined the morality of (the show, to its credit, makes a better go at this, but that is a TV show made explicitly to connect continuity dots), so John Goodman is here, and good luck figuring out what his deal is. Is he a willing participant in this military industrial circlejerk, or a true student of monsters who wants to listen to Kong? Both. Sort of. It’s not easily definable.
There are also the good faction of soldiers, the bad faction of soldiers, Tom Hiddleston’s tracker who turns from avaricious mercenary to true hugger between scenes halfway through, Brie Larson’s war photographer, and the entire John C. Reilly situation, in which the movie positively busts open another unrelated can of worms in its white-guy-gone-native visuals. Skull Island is positively bursting with characters, and it’s chosen the Oppenheimer route of deciding to make them all recognisable faces. Shea Whigham is about tenth-billed. I can’t remember his character’s name.
A bloated ensemble is one thing, but Skull Island also loads its plate with CGI beastie threats, with the “skull crawlers” providing something for Kong to fight in the third act, and other creatures giving the heroes things to fight at ground level. This makes sense, because a big dumb action movie needs big dumb action, but it hardly helps with the clutter.
When you’re trying to make a trenchant anti-war argument, it isn’t helped by Tom Hiddleston slicing his way through a horde of monster bats as we are prodded to ooh and aah at the visuals. When you’re trying to tell a story about a peaceful island getting mucked up by nasty human invaders, it’s less effective when it’s basically just one dickhead who’s causing all the fuss, and the rest of everyone else is just about okay.
That old saying about how anti-war films always end up glorifying war through the process of depicting it? It’s true here. Anti-war King Kong films always end up glorifying war against Skull-crawlers.
Spoiler alert: the movie isn’t really trying to make an anti-war argument. It’s not trying very hard. Samuel L. Jackson dies with twenty minutes to go, and it is not a death of significance. This character and his story, on which Skull Island’s meaning hinges, are just flavouring. And that’s all Skull Island is, really. Flavouring. It is an onslaught of flavours, some of which are quite pleasurable, but at the end of the day, it’s just a big pile of icing in search of a cake.
Let’s return to the Apocalypse Now thing, because it was clearly a major concern for director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. His stated intent was to make “Apocalypse Now with King Kong”. It’s an illuminating comment, because that’s a lot of what he did. He added a big ape to Francis Ford Coppola’s film. It’s a mix-and-match job, more than anything, full of slavish recreations that make us think “what if that movie had a monkey in it?”.
Homages are fun. I get it. There’s not anything wrong with giving a sweet high-five to the greats of cinema, and it’s funny to do it in a major blockbuster. But, much like announcing oneself as a Vietnam movie with vague anti-war intentions, invoking something like Apocalypse Now puts the onus on a movie to justify itself. Why are these images being reproduced here? How are they different now?
You know the answer, reader. It’s because there’s a monkey in them now.
If Skull Island just wanted to be mindless spectacle, that would have been a-OK. It’s the direction the franchise would eventually take. It’s a big monkey, big deal. But all this imagery, and all these needle drops, and all that Samuel L. Jackson glowering into the distance, works directly against that intended sugar high, and it’s unclear if Skull Island really knows that.
There are things to enjoy about this film, mind you. I haven’t focused on them because focusing on them isn’t interesting. It’s fun when apes go roar, okay? I’m not immune.
You need to do something with your influences. It’s the difference between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, or the fuck-awful Shining bit in Ready Player One and the Overlook sequences in Doctor Sleep.
Apocalypse Now with King Kong? Well, you made it, Jordan. You made that movie. Perhaps consider why you did that.
Next time: Godzilla returns, and he’s bringing a whole retinue of buddies with him. It’s Rodan! It’s King Ghidorah. It’s…
Mothra is mothra-ing.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters brings the monster mash and a whole bunch of continuity-building work ahead of the big crossover. There’s a lot to chew on here - that is, if we can see what’s going on through the dark and the rain.
Sheesh. Poor visibility, am I right?
I'm surprised you don't discuss the fact that King Kong 2005 actually references Heart of Darkness quite overtly with the Jimmy and Mr. Hayes characters.
Regarding visibility - I do believe there are different transfers of the first two Godzilla movies with different levels of legibility. I've seen arguments made on YouTube that the brightness of the first film seemed to have been diminished on home video. Meanwhile, KOTM def-ly looked brighter and the action was far more legible than my homevid copy when I re-watched it recently on Netflix (sadly no longer available there.)