Culture
The Problem With 'Kong'
The latest big gorilla romp is full of spectacle and explosions, but it’s missing something very important.
There’s something wrong with Kong: Skull Island. The new retelling of the durable giant-gorilla myth is already on its way to being a box-office hit, but it departs from the 1933 original and its two remakes in several ways. This time, the eponymous ape gets a colon and an upsizing—he’s 100 feet tall, which is ludicrous; previous Kongs hovered between 25 and 50 feet. The film is set in 1973, and it leans heavily on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (and that film’s source material, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness) for inspiration, though some reviewers have pointed out that these allusive exertions add up to little beyond some cool visuals.