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The monsters are brilliantly designed and skillfully animated (except for a few shots where Kong looks a tad cartoony), and the army of visual and sound effects artists convince you that that these CGI titans live and breathe and weigh hundreds of tons. I say this with the authority of a man who probably spent months of his childhood making animal and dinosaur figurines fight each other in a sandbox, so don’t even try arguing with me, there’s no point.
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Annoyed as I am by the studios’ obsession with “expanded universe” storytelling, it seems tailor-made for films with apes and lizards the size of skyscrapers. As you may have heard, this new Kong inhabits the same universe as Edwards’ “Godzilla” and represents stage two in Warner Bros' scheme to Marvel-ize the giant monster picture by releasing an interconnected series of films that will build to King Kong fighting Godzilla. The latter theory was also advanced in Gareth Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla,” a slow-reveal monster film. Jackson) who develops an Ahab-like obsession with killing Kong a war photographer ( Brie Larson) who looks like a Breck girl and has no meaningful plot function and a wild-eyed visionary ( John Goodman) who believes the earth is hollow and filled with beasts whose existence predates the dinosaurs. Reilly, who steals the film instantly and never gives it back) a tough, quiet British SAS officer ( Tom Hiddleston) who has amazing hair a Special Forces colonel ( Samuel L. The cast includes a couple dozen people who are basically monster chow and therefore not worth describing here a World War II airman who’s been trapped on the island for 28 years (woolly-bearded John C. At its best it reminded me of “The Mysterious Island” and “The Land that Time Forgot,” films that were little more than collections of monster-driven action scenes hitched to a perfunctory story about explorers wandering a jungle, doing stuff they were warned not to do, and getting eaten. This one-about a team of soldiers and scientists that gets stranded on Skull Island during a mission to map the island’s geological interior with explosive charges, which you absolutely should not do when visiting a place called Skull Island-is a half-magnificent, half-misguided example of a “show me the monster” movie. I’m not mentioning the difference in approach to condemn the new Kong: quite the contrary.
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