WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.
With the movie scoring a 79% on Rotten Tomatos, "Kong: Skull Island" conquered the box office this weekend. The ape racked in a whopping $61 million within the first few days. The movie has earned some well deserved hype for its opening. The trailer was released early, and there was a ride formed in Universal, so the movie was well known, but that is not what brought people into the theater. The movie was actually really good. Now what makes this movie good? Nearly everything.
"Kong: Skull Island" stuck to its roots with the plot, however with a huge twist. Whether it was the 1933 release or the 2005 one, it paid homage to the original King Kong: people go to Skull Island, Kong is there, people try to hurt Kong, Kong turns out to be pretty cool, Kong has soft spot for the leading actress. This plot had all of that action in there, but took an extremely twisted turn. The plot of Skull Island is darker than the original. The concept was great. Having mysterious, dangerous creatures on the island was a fantastic idea. The idea of human disturbing Kong's worst enemy really worked for me.
Pretty much everything that happens is at the fault of human destroying Kong's territory. The movie takes place in the seventies where a group called Monarch wants to do a geological mapping of an undiscovered that they call Skull Island because of its shape. The group led by Bill Randa, (John Goodman), and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins), gets government funding to embark on the expedition of a life time. The receive a military escort from a group called The Sky Devils led by Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), and are accompanied by an anti-war photographer known as Mason Weaver (brie Larson), and a former British Special Air Agent known as James Conrad, (Tom Hiddleston). The group is planning on dropping seismic charges to un-map the geological terrain of the island, turns out that wasn't a very smart idea.
The explosions make Kong extremely angry which forces him to kill of half of Colonel Prestonsteam. Half of the team survives, and most of them are split up. James, Mason, Houston and a few others are separated from Preston, and Bill Randa. This is where all of the rising action takes place. James, Mason and Houston discover there are people on this island and finds WW2 veteran Hank Marlow who has been trapped on the island for 28 years. Hank tells the team that there is something bigger, and badder than Kong and calls them Skull Crawlers. The two teams rush to find each other, but have different agendas. Through the entire movie people die, and it is a little graphic.
Now that you know there are weird, and nonexistent animals on this island, I can tell you the special effects were amazing. I did not notice once that the cast was not fully surrounded by the weird creatures on this island. Kong was beautifully re-imagined. The production team had paid extremely close attention to every small detail on him, because he looks extremely real.
The amazing CGI is followed by an amazing script. The script was written beautifully. In the beginning I knew exactly what was happening and why they were going to the island. There was parts that held a lot of tension, but were broken up with little funny comments from characters. The characters were extremely well developed also. The star studded cast really added to the movie.
"Kong: Skull Island" was simply amazing. If you have not seen it, I highly recommend you do!
