Kong: Skull Island – 2017
This movie was ten kinds of stupid. The visual effects themselves were passable… most of the time, though there were some effects that were downright awful. But the unfortunate truth of the matter is that the real problems were with the script. When the visual effects artists are given the task of creating visuals that are so unrealistic that they take me out of the movie with their ridiculousness, the effects fail. And who else can I blame, but the director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts.
What I mean is that you can make a giant ape as photo-realistic as you want, but if he doesn’t move like an ape, I don’t buy into the illusion. But I get what they were trying to do. First, they were harkening back to the original 1933 version of King Kong, where he was not fully ape, and not fully man. He was both. Second, as I watched the film, it became clear that this was not a King Kong movie. It was a Godzilla movie. This was a film whose real purpose was to introduce King Kong into the Godzilla universe. So ok, I have to take that for what it is. I guess I was just spoiled by Peter Jackson’s phenomenal 2005 Kong, where he made a giant gorilla, while this version of Kong is its own unique creature.
Now, I have to mention his height. In the original 1933 film, directed by Merian C. Cooper, he was 18 feet tall, but 24 feet tall in New York. In 1976, director Dino De Laurentiis made him 42 feet tall. In 2005, Jackson scaled him back down to 25 feet tall. But in order to make him a worthy opponent for Godzilla in a future movie, Jordan Vogt-Roberts pumped him up to 104 feet tall. That’s a pretty big difference.
At its core, this was a monster movie, and according to the director, many of the fantasy monsters that were created, were inspired by Japanese Anime and Pokemon. Nowhere was this more evident than in the design of Kong’s main adversaries, the Skullcrawlers. They had a torso that was like a hunchbacked snake or lizard, but with only two limbs, powerful legs/arms. But there was also a giant cross between a spider and a crab, there was a giant six-horned water buffalo, and a giant six-legged, uh… turtle/stick insect? The obvious Pokemon design influence made everything look slightly campy and silly.
But the worst effect in the movie was when our heroes were being attacked by a flock of monster birds. A man using a samurai sword was slicing them in half. There is a terrible shot where, in slow motion, a bird is opened up like a zipper. Thick globs of blue blood squirt dramatically, and the man’s gas-masked face is revealed behind the CGI gore. The images looked completely separate, and the blue blood looked almost laughable. But I don’t know. The silly effect of a man being torn limb from limb by the birds against the backdrop of a giant sun was pretty bad too. The bird is holding the man’s briefcase, and yet, his arm comes off at the shoulder. What would go first, the man’s shoulder joint or his grip on the brief case? And someone needs to tell the director that the Aurora Borealis does not happen in tropical zones because… science. It’s all in the details, Roberts.