Kong: Skull Island (2017) – Another mechanically competent blockbusterish movie-flavored factory product, with maybe some humans involved. I have a list of complaints — the soldier stranded on the island for decades was too well-fed, we spend way too much screentime with an isolated soldier who ends up dying off-screen, there’s no way that pterodactyls that size would have enough lift to snatch up a grown human and then pull him apart in midair — but my biggest complaint is how hard everyone tried to keep away from the central “Beauty & the Beast” motif of the original and preceding two remakes (there’s a nod to it, but it felt grudging). Mostly it had me wondering, “Did Tom Hiddleston ever imagine he’d be an action star?”
The Soldier (1982) – I tried to watch the whole thing, really I did; I made it to about the two-thirds mark before my apathy became active and finally turned if off. Ken Wahl is a super-secret CIA agent called “The Soldier” who only gets called when Russian/terrorist world-shattering plots are so boring that they threaten to put the entire Earth to sleep. Writer/director James Glickenhaus does nothing to be proud of, and he should have taken editor Paul Fried into an alley and beaten him to death with a tire iron. Thrill to the walking-into-the-room action, the unloading-the-truck action, the bureaucratic-discussion-around-a-table action, the putting-chemicals-in-a-lightbulb action, the standing-in-a-ski-cablecar action… The icing on the cake is the boringest score Tangerine Dream ever composed, which is saying something.
At the Earth’s Core (1976) – Everything about this movie demands an exclamation point: Doug McClure in his “manly everyman” mode! Peter Cushing as a hilarious, pip-pip-ever-so-British inventor! Caroline Munro, looking good while being good to look at! Directed by Kevin “The Land That Time Forgot/The People That Time Forgot” Connor, from a novel by America’s best bad novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs! Paper-mache rocks! Rubbery man-in-suit evil telepathic parrots! Rear screen projection everywhere you look! You can’t call it good, but you also can’t call it boring.
You’re first sentence of the Kong: Skull Island review perfectly encapsulates how I felt about the movie but struggled to articulate. I can imagine an algorithm that based on the setting and plot of your movie outputs exactly which elements need to be included. Vietnam era? Well, throw in a bunch of CCR tunes. You won’t be able to tell it’s the late 60’s without a bunch of contemporary rock music.
I was very annoyed that the titular gorilla did not shake the earth when he walked. A giant gorilla shouldn’t be able to sneak up on people. How do you omit such an obvious detail in a giant monster movie?
The “anti-war” photographer character played by Brie Larson was particularly annoying. She’s especially insufferable in the (spoiler?) post credits scene when she defiantly tells her captors she will tell the Russians about the island. I cant’ think of any reason why she’d want to do that, but given the time period it seems a bit treason like.