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If you're looking for a good time with a monster this week — in fact, scores of them — you're in luck.
The new King Kong movie Kong: Skull Island is a treasure: thrilling, funny, and occasionally sublime.
It's also a better film about war than Hacksaw Ridge, a movie like many others that tried to make sense of human carnage via the consolation of a virtuous hero.
Kong: Skull Island, on the other hand, is particularly effective at depicting war as an existential crap shoot.
These characters — with their quirks and funny one-liners and letters home to family — have no time for arcs, not when a giant spider could suddenly skewer them through the mouth.
The tragedy of war is that it cuts people's story arcs short in real life too.
Anyhow, Kong: Skull Island isn't completely devoid of sense or shape.
It's set in the wake of Nixon's retreat announcement on Vietnam in 1973, and is about a group of scientists and military who land their choppers on an uncharted island.
These include Samuel L Jackson's scrapping-for-a-fight squad leader, Brie Larson's hippy war photographer and Tom Hiddleston's blue-eyed ex-commando.
The first sequence that introduces us to the big CGI beast is a hoot, with Zack Snyder's cinematographer Larry Fong pulling out a range of effects.
It's set to Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and references some of the elements of Coppola's iconic opening to Apocalypse Now — slow motion rotors, palm trees, orange explosions.
Then it's suddenly cut short by a palm tree flung in the opposite direction.
It's a spectacular, ironic scene where nature hits back, and it sets the tone: from here on in, monsters of various shapes and sizes will impress upon these humans just how futile their plans are.
The fun for the audience is in the way director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (directing his second feature) stretches his film across formal extremes: shouting one minute, whispering the next, pulling out wide, snapping in close.
There are inventive fight sequences that flip the power balance, jokey snap edits — he cuts from a character falling into Kong's mouth to another biting into a sandwich — and some surprisingly good character development for a movie so indebted to B-grade action movie schlock.
When the comic actor John C Reilly shows up midway through, this strength finds a most interesting outlet, on occasion channelling a kind of Dennis Hopper Heart of Darkness haiku.
I don't want to overstate this. The film might have done more with its political set-up, and it doesn't follow through on the satirical promise of an early line — uttered by John Goodman, who plays one of the scientists — that there'll never be a more screwed-up time in Washington.
But there is something poignant in the way this misadventure plays out, and how the story of those who get out alive is upstaged by the blood-splattered spectacle of those who don't.
Meanwhile, Kong remains distant and relatively inscrutable.
Compare this to previous films that have enlisted the monster for more obvious symbolic purposes, and there's an element of dignity about it.
While there are far worse creatures on the island than Kong, he's not necessarily our friend. And do we even deserve to be his?
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Topics: horror-films, film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, united-states