It is really bad!
I have never walked out of a movie theater before the film is over. The new Kong put me to the test on sitting through the entire thing. This movie is an absolute piece of garbage from beginning to end. I cannot believe that this movie is boasting a positive rating on RT.
The film is about some idiots who want to explore an island and get a bunch of Vietnam vets (who are literally on their way home from the war) to escort them. Of course, things go south and monsters, blah, blah, blah.
It is hard to say where this film exactly went wrong, because so much in the film simply doesn’t work. For me, the film takes itself way too seriously. Everyone is brooding and trying to symbolize some greater point about war and the environment while cartoon monsters are fighting in the background. The movie is laughable.
I am not sure if it was intentional, but the movie presents American soldiers as complete morons. The plot of the film is literally: go to island, get destroyed by big ape, now with no helicopters and ¼ of the people we can get em this time!
Movies like this can be fun, but it must embrace the inherent cheesiness to do so. This movie takes itself so seriously that it just doesn’t feel like a monster film. Oddly, the overly serious tone does not transfer to decent dialogue. Perhaps even odder is that the film boasts a lot of stars. Tom Hiddleston takes the lead as a salty British mercenary who serves as the guide. Samuel L. Jackson serves as the primary antagonist—an insane American military officer. Finally, Brie Larson rounds out the top billing as a hardened war photographer. The three leads barely interact with each other, and the film relies on basic coding to let us know who to root for. However, we have one person doing this for money, one for fame, and one is searching for belonging. Oddly, the only person whose motivations make sense is Jackson, but they portray him in such a grotesquely stupid way there is no connecting with him.
The fear of attack, a major issue within human society and a major theme of this issue, is not presented as something that should be discussed, but rather a way to move the characters from A to B. I am harping on these pseudo-philosophical aspects because that is what the movie primarily presents. The action sequences are overcooked, overlong, and not very interesting. The videogame style fight sequences (including a final boss!) feature larger than life monsters, but the fakeness of it all drags it down.
I wanted a fun stupid movie. Seriously. Monster movies should be epic spectacles of technical and practical effects with humor and terror. The film brings the monsters, but has them interact in such a vapid and empty way that the movie slogs toward a predictable and dumb ending. It can’t be this hard to make a movie about monsters breaking shit. 0/10.
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