I really wanted to give this movie a better score but I just could not bring myself to overlook the stupid and crappy story.

Okay, let’s start with the bad. The movie is about a group of explorers exploring this Skull Island. No surprise there. They are accompanied by a military detachment. Somewhat okay still, there is a half decent explanation for that. One of the main characters in the movie is Lieutenant Colonel Packard. At first, I quite liked him, especially when he told off the journalist informing her that they did not loose the war, it was abandoned by the politicians.

However, from then on it goes really bad. Warning, spoilers ahead!

[spoiler]Once on the island Kong is revealed rather quickly. Something that I felt was a bit of a shame. There was no suspense building up for the reveal of the mighty ape. Okay, I could live with that. What I cannot live with is that these total dumb-asses, having discovered a scientific find of unprecedented magnitude, goes straight on to shooting off their guns. What the fuck? Not only that, they just keep shooting and circling around him while he trashes them one by one. That scene, while sporting some impressive action and CGI, was just so fucked up that one wondered if the author deliberately wanted to insult the audience.[/spoiler]

From then on I just cringed every time Colonel Packard was in the picture. He was clearly mentally unstable. He doggedly continued to want to kill Kong and used retrieving his men as a poor excuse. This is just the kind of shitty, overused and cliche’d Hollywood script that drives me nuts.

Now, with that over with, the movie was technically quite good. The actors are doing a decent enough job of their roles. The story, excluding the Vietnam references and general let’s make the military look bad old bullshit, was actually not to bad. It was a different take on the King Kong history for sure.

The CGI, the action and the various monsters were very cool. Not surprisingly King Kong was not the only threat on the Island. This time they did not just throw a few dinosaurs in but was rather creative bringing in creatures from all kind of animal (and insect) families as well as some home cooked ones, the skull crawlers.

The scenery is also very enjoyable. Apart from my gripes mentioned above I did enjoy a lot of the movie. However, the military clusterfuck that the script writer threw in there severely diminished my enjoyment of the movie and I cannot really bring me to give it more that a 3 out of 5 score.