So I give zero shits about King Kong. And yet I watched Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong movie because a) the massive impact his Lord of the Rings had on me, and b) I bought a launch-window Xbox 360, and (because launch windows have very small game selection) played Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie and wanted to see what I was watching an adaptation of.

And then later, for AFI reasons, I watched the 1933 movie (which, tbh, adjusted for time, was a lot better than the Peter Jackson version; and tbh adjusted for time was also less racist). And so that is two (2) Kings Kong that I watched, despite giving zero (0) shits about the character, and therefore when they came out with yet another remake, I completely ignored it.

And then… and then I saw a trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong and lord help me, it looked kinda fun, and people said that Kong: Skull Island was a prequel to it, and so what the hell, it’s on HBOMAX, let’s give it a whirl.

So the main thing to say about this version is that unlike Peter Jackson’s take, this isn’t a remake of the 1933 movie, it’s a fresh take on the concept. So here we don’t have any kind of old-timey movie crew going to Skull Island, we have a Cold War-era military mission. And that military isn’t looking for a big monkey, they’re looking for a giant monster — this Kong is enormous compared to previous movie Kongs. “How the fuck is King Kong going to take on Godzilla?” is a question answered by looking at the monkey-scale of this movie.

To the movie’s credit, they keep the action entirely where the subtitle says it takes place, and they skip the whole “go to New York, fight biplanes” part (which really wouldn’t make any sense in the ’70s). I feel like that makes it a tighter movie, but that also means that it’s mostly barely a movie at all. Like, to sum up this movie in 100,000% spoileriffic detail, it’s: “Military mission goes to island, fights Kong, gets knocked out of the sky, realizes that there are other monsters and that Kong isn’t the only one, watches as Kong fights the other monsters, then I guess gets rescued, the end.”

There are very few characters to speak of, despite an all-star (Loki! Captain Marvel! Nick Fury! John C. Reilly who is not a Marvel character!) cast. There is very little human drama or tension in the story (the most emotionally affecting moment in the entire two hour length of the movie happens over the end credits). It’s really all about the spectacle, and… you know, it’s 2020 at this point, or arguably even 2021, and mere spectacle seems insufficient to carry a movie.

So I guess all I can say is this: I had been intending to watch a more interesting movie tonight, either one of Edward Yang’s early films or a Bernardo Bertolucci film, but then I had a handful of cocktails, and those seemed like they might be a bit slippery, and I turned this on instead, and I enjoyed it just fine. So if you’ve had some fraction of your brain turned off by alcohol, hey, here’s a movie for you. Not really recommended, but I guess it is a basically competent version of what you’d think it is, so there’s that.