Review Roundup: Kong: Skull Island is full of epic action, but lacks on story

The eighth wonder of the world, King Kong, has been absent from the big screen for about 12 years but now he's about to make his return before going head to head with the Japan's own deadly monster, Godzilla, in 2020. The only question on the minds of fans is if it'll suffer the same fate as the Godzilla reboot from 2014.

For those who didn't see it or just forgot, the Godzilla reboot was considered slightly average/mediocre due to its focus on the humans and boring story. Although the battles between the monsters were epic and intense and there was a nice touch of horror, it didn't completely resonate with fans.

Kong: Skull Island seems to add the right amount of the ape but the story and time with the humans on the island may be forgettable. Below you'll find some excerpts from reviewers who both loved and disliked the reboot of King Kong. At the time of writing this, the movie sits at an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes with 24 positive reviews and 6 negative reviews.

Entertainment Weekly

"As for subtlety, there isn’t much of that either. The team starts dropping bombs and wreaking havoc on mother nature, letting you know that the real monster is man himself. Meanwhile, Reilly and the monsters are left trying to save the picture. And mostly, they succeed. Kong swats their helicopters out of the sky like a giant swatting pesky flies. Jackson barks his great vengeance and furious anger. Hiddleston smolders and briefly wields a samurai sword. Larson takes surprisingly few pictures for a photographer, but she does get her Fay Wray moment. And Reilly delivers sorely needed punchlines between exposition about Kong’s reputation as the king of the island. The rest are, more or less, lining up for the menagerie of monsters’ body count—some of the kills are surprisingly clever and aren’t worth spoiling. Meanwhile, Kong does his thing and does it well. The poor misunderstood guy seems destined to keep proving to humankind that he comes in peace. I kept waiting for a single tear to streak down his big hairy cheek."

B-

The Guardian

"The dramatic presence of Kong himself is muddled. The film tries to make him the island’s noble-savage deity, the hairy good guy, as opposed to the huge baddie lizards who are scuttling around the place but are kept in check by the mighty Kong. The script makes a half-hearted joke about not knowing what to call these lizards; I suspect none of the writers could agree. How did we get from the 1933 King Kong to this? A theory of de-evolution is needed."

1/5 Stars

IGN

"The film’s pacing can be spotty at times, especially near the middle when all of the group’s surviving members are trying to regroup and meet back up. Additionally, the directions it takes some of its main characters in (especially Packard and Randa) feel inorganic and rushed compared to the rest of the film. But for what Kong: Skull Island sets out to do, which is deliver a monster movie filled with the kind of action and destruction that audiences have never seen from a King Kong film before, it’s hard to imagine it doing a much better job than it does.

There’s a moment in Kong: Skull Island when one of the soldiers plays some '70s music for Reilly’s Marlow, who responds by asking, “How can you swing to this?,” confused by the heavy emphasis on electric guitars rather than a piano or saxophone. Some King Kong purists may feel that same frustration with Skull Island, but while the aesthetic of this new adventure may be very different, it ends up evoking the same feeling that made King Kong such an icon in the first place. Even if this time, it’s coming to you with roaring electric guitars and napalm rather than Empire State Buildings and damsels in distress."

8/10

Collider

"Skull Island does get marks for telling a new story in the Kong mythology. This is the first Kong film (not including the Godzilla monster movies) that is entirely contained to the island and doesn’t involve an ape fixation on the blonde woman. This story is more interested in the ideas of soldiers who’ve just spent years fighting a senseless war, having no real ending to that war and desiring to kill everything in sight simply because it provides an ending of perceived justice—killing what killed their battalion. But no matter how many shots of a hazy orange sun or helicopters and river boats blasting era-specific anti-war tunes you’ll never be convinced that the war metaphor carries as much weight as Apocalypse Now as the film wants you to think it does. (Legendary also includes a few Jurassic Park/Jurassic World winks by having Jackson use the “hold on to your butts” line and having a very similar pterodactyl-like attack to kill the lawyer type.)"

"Ultimately, the focus on CGI monster attacks pushes the characters too far into the corners of the story. And Kong’s alone time only features monster battles, so there’s no extra heft afforded to the King. So even though Skull Island features some truly breathtaking moments that incorporate the elements that everyone loved in Godzilla—the tense, still and smoky seconds where an unseen monster lurks (cinematographer Larry Fong deserves a shout-out; as does a particular ingenious use of a malfunctioning camera flash)—it feels like a movie that was made in a focus group chemist lab and never solidifies an identity."

C

The Hollywood Reporter

Mix King Kong with The Lost World, spike it with a bracing dash of Apocalypse Now and you've got Kong: Skull Island, in which Warner Bros. finally gets the effects-driven fantasy adventure formula right again after numerous misfires. This highly entertaining return of one of the cinema's most enduring giant beasts moves like crazy — the film feels more like 90 minutes than two hours — and achieves an ideal balance between wild action, throwaway humor, genre refreshment and, perhaps most impressively, a nonchalant awareness of its own modest importance in the bigger scheme of things; unlike most modern franchise blockbusters, it doesn't try to pummel you into submission.

Leagues better than Peter Jackson's bloated, three-hour Kong of 2005, this one looks poised for strong returns and potential sequels co-starring hinted-at monsters from movie lore.

No Score

So the film seems pretty divisive, guess you'll have to see the movie for yourself to see where you fall on the spectrum!

Kong: Skull Island charges into theaters on March 10th, 2017.