Kong: Skull Island is a bizarre mess of a film that despite all odds being against it, manages to entertain slightly more than the average brain dead blockbuster of this type. I’m not saying Kong isn’t brain dead, it is, but it’s stupid in an almost charming way like it’s embracing how absurd it is and having a bit of fun with it. What really attracted me to Kong was that the marketing campaign was promoting it as being very much inspired by Apocalypse Now, most clearly evidenced by the poster for it.

Being a huge fan of Coppola’s nightmarish Vietnam masterpiece, I was very interested in what connections it could possibly have. As it turns out, the inspirations are mostly superficial, only drawing on a few select images from Apocalypse, namely; the setting/rising sun, colorful flares and a boat trip down a familiar looking river. There’s also a scene that pretty closely mirrors the helicopter sequence from Apocalypse, and one the characters is named Conrad. Apparently the director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts said that it takes inspiration from The Conversation as well, but I don’t really know what the heck he’s talking about with that. Anyway, I do actually like the Apocalypse styled aesthetics of the film, it sort of manages to give it its own identity, even if it’s one ripped from another film.

The CGI is fine, there are some creative designs for the various monsters on the island and Kong himself looks quite good. Despite the nice CGI on him, Kong is somehow both overused and underused. I guess Legendary Entertainment really took the complaints that Godzilla wasn’t in the 2014 Godzilla movie enough to heart, because we see Kong in full about 2 minutes in. There’s still a “big reveal” of him later, which is admittedly pretty cool and probably the highlight of the whole thing, but they still show Kong too early. But then when he’s offscreen the film suffers and that’s because of the human characters.

With two exceptions, all of the characters are awful. Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and surprisingly, John Goodman all give incredibly dull performances. Not that it’s their fault, the screenplay gives them nothing to work with. I really can’t remember a single thing about any of them other than that someone was named after Joseph Conrad. The exceptions are Samuel Jackson and John C. Reilly. Jackson yells his whole performance and looks angry the whole time which is fun, and Reilly provides some decent comic relief and is the only mildly interesting person on the island. Without these two, the film would suffer greatly. The best parts are when it just gets stupid.

There’s a ridiculous scene with Tom Hiddleston wearing a gas mask running through green fumes and chopping up birds with a samurai sword in slow motion. Another unintentionally funny scene is supposed to be an emotional one when one of the unnamed generic soldiers decides to sacrifice himself to save the others which results in him being tossed into a mountain by a lizard and exploding. If these scenes described sound like fun to you, and you generally like this kind of schlock, you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of Kong: Skull Island.