Meat at the Movies: ‘Kong: Skull Island’ Is Bananas

There’s only one major release this weekend, but it is a big one – and I don’t just mean it’s a movie I’m excited about, I mean it’s literally about a giant monster. Kong: Skull Island, a new King Kong movie, is coming out this weekend, and I’m pretty stoked for it. It’s been 12 years since the last King Kong in 2005, which starred Naomi Watts and Jack Black – that’s a movie that I liked, but it was just a remake of the original film from 1933, and it looks like Skull Island is taking a new direction with the Kong series.

This movie is a reboot which takes place in the 1970s and follows a team of scientists and explorers who set out on an expedition to research this newly-discovered island in the Pacific – and of course, when they arrive, their main mission becomes survival as they face off against King Kong. If you watch the trailers and see the posters for this movie, it looks like they’re taking a lot of visual cues from Vietnam war movies, which seems an odd choice for your giant monkey movie, but I’m pretty into it. In fact, the posters for this movie are actually direct recreations of the posters for Apocalypse Now, and they’re pretty awesome, I have one of them as the background on my phone, a true mark of quality.

Reviews have been pretty strong overall, saying it’s an exciting story, really fast-paced, has tons of monkey action, King Kong looks great throughout, and the cast for this movie is totally nuts. It's just an incredible A-list cast across the board: Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly – it’s pretty stacked. And the movie is pretty much supposed to stand on its own, but it is apparently set in the same universe as the Godzilla movie which came out a few years ago – that’s a movie that I really, really liked and it seems they want to build to an eventual Godzilla vs. Kong movie, which they’ve done once before in the 60s, but it was a Japanese movie with the guys in rubber suits. And while that’s fun, I think it could be really really cool to see these big new versions of the monsters going at each other.

So Kong: Skull Island may be the only major release this weekend, but it’s well worth seeking out, and until next time, we’ll meat at the movies.