For Reel

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

The King Kong franchise resurfaces every so often to showcase the height of contemporary special effects. Most recently, the Peter Jackson adaptation was treated as a curio in the way that it continued the use of the new motion capture techniques that were innovated in the Lord of the Rings films. It diminishes some of the series’ sense of spectacle, then, that Kong: Skull Island has nothing more spectacularly imagined than what is seen in the average blockbuster these days—even bloating the beast up to a heretofore unseen scale barely makes one’s eyes widen. Forgoing the burden of “prestige”, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts wisely uses Kong mythology merely for the purposes of developing an unashamed light adventure film that dishes out a new monster every twenty minutes or so of screen time. If it feels rather ordinary among the crop of Hollywood adventure stories, it is never suffocated by the same weight that hampered Jackson’s vision. Vogt-Roberts demonstrates some personality in the filmmaking—the 1970s period detail provides for both an engaging classic rock soundtrack and the occasionally inspired period-specific touch of wit (including the frequent cutaways to a Nixon bobblehead during an impressive early set piece)—but other sequences, such as Tom Hiddleston slashing through monsters with a samurai sword, are total misfires.