New to DVD: Kong: Skull Island

I expected to enjoy Kong: Skull Island -- after all, why else would I rent it? -- but I didn't expect the writing to be almost as good as the spectacle. Face it, when you rent a movie about a giant gorilla, you're not exactly looking for Pulitzer material, so I don't want to make it sound like that's what you'll get. But what I am saying is that despite Hollywood's eternal reputation for dumbing down its material more and more each year, this latest interpretation of King Kong is the most intelligent.

And, of course, there are giant monsters randomly attacking people. That too.

But to say that this is the smartest of the King Kong movies is a bolder statement than you might at first think. People tend to remember these films as "the ones with the giant gorilla," and they're not wrong, but that description, while accurate, is also dismayingly reductive. The filmmakers of each generation have always stayed true to one poignant premise, that unlike other monsters, Kong is only a monster because humans force him to be. This is why (spoiler alert for a 1930s movie!) his death at the end is remembered as a moment of sorrow rather than of triumph.

Still, previous interpretations of Kong have emphasized his pathos by contrasting him with the human characters, who, to put it mildly, tend to be nothing more than generic stock characters. I mean, has there ever been a more definitive "damsel in distress" than Fay Wray in the original movie?

Kong: Skull Island certainly contains its share of stock characters -- there's the Mercenary Action Hero (Tom Hiddleston as Captain James Conrad) the Disgraced Scientist With Something to Prove (John Goodman as Bill Randa), and a whole truckload's worth of interchangable soldiers and nameless scientific assistants who can all be conveniently killed off to illustrate danger without wasting time on emotional investment.

But unlike previous Kong films, Skull Island does provide two characters with a surprising degree of character development. Even if you could somehow subtract Kong and the other monsters from the movie, these characters would be worthy of stories in their own right.

The first of these two characters is Colonel Preston Packard, a career military man played by Samuel L. Jackson. The ads, using a combination of selective editing and, I suspect (I may be wrong) footage that never made it into the final film, make Preston Packard look identical to the type of character that Jackson plays again and again these days. You know the kind, the "I'm a bad-ass, and I enjoy every minute of it!" type.

But the ads, in the presentation of Jackson's character, are misleading. It's interesting how Jackson has acted in dozens of dramas, many of them quite good, but one of his most nuanced characters is in an ensemble special effects extravaganza about a giant ape.

After a prologue set in World War II, the main storyline starts out on the very last day of the Vietnam War. Nixon has announced the withdrawal of troops, the soldiers are packing to go home, and they're all elated to do so, with the exception of Packard, who's depressed that the war is over. It's certainly not that he's blood-thirsty or macho, but he's got his emotional reasons: He's sad to say goodbye to his men, for whom he's developed a great deal of affection. The war gave him a sense of purpose. And he sees the manner in which the war ended as a disappointing note to end his career on. When he explains to photojournalist Mason Weaver that "we didn't lose the war, we abandoned it," you can tell that he truly believes that to be the case, but also that the distinction brings no comfort to him.

So when Packard is assigned "one more mission" before his retirement, everyone who's ever seen a movie ever knows that it's not going to end well for him, but we can also understand why he happily accepts even when most other soldiers would be crestfallen.

That mission is to lead the military escort for the scientists who are setting out to explore the newly discovered Skull Island. As the story demands it, the humans quickly find themselves shipwrecked on the island, and at the mercy of not just Kong, but a laundry list of other monsters as well: giant insects, fantastically enormous bison, pterodactyls, and "skullwalkers," terrifying creatures that almost defy description.

They also encounter the movie's other standout character, Hank Marlow, an Air Force pilot who's been stranded on the island ever since that prologue set way back in World War II. Marlow is played by John C. Reilly, who is best known for starring in a series of silly comedies with Will Ferrell, so you'd expect him to bring some comic relief to the action, which, to some extent, he does: Marlow not only has a habit of wisecracks, but he's also possibly got a screw or two loose, as anyone else would if they've been living on an island infested with monsters for the past few decades.

But the more time the movie spends with Marlow, the more interesting the character becomes. Just as Jackson's character is surprisingly less Jacksony than we were led to expect, Marlow is more than just your typical John C. Reilly wacky supporting character. Marlow is full of surprises, but surprises that make sense. Each time we learn something new about him, we first think "whoa, I didn't see that coming!" but then you think, "but yeah, okay, I totally get it." Marlow doesn't have as much screen time as Hiddleston's Conrad or Jackson's Packard, but the movie both begins and ends with Reilly's character, and I was happy that it did. He is easily the best and most interesting character in the movie.

Still, Jackson's Preston Packard is a close second. After some of Packard's beloved men are killed in their initial encounter with Kong, Packard becomes determined to kill him. Even as the movie piles on reason after reason (you'd be surprised by how many!) why killing Kong would be a terrible thing to do on every level -- morally, practically, tactically -- Packard ignores all pleas, signs, and warnings for him to stop, until his obsession with killing Kong eclipses all his other goals and consumes everything about the character that initially made him a good and even virtuous man. The dynamic between Kong and Packard becomes very reminiscent of the dynamic between Moby-Dick and Captain Ahab -- I was very aware of this similarity while watching the movie, and wasn't surprised to later learn that Jackson also made this comparison during interviews -- but at the risk of offending literature fans, I'd argue that Packard's obsession is more compelling than Ahab's. Ahab may be the defining character when it comes to obsession and revenge, but his obsession lacks development and nuance; he's depicted as mad with a lust for vengeance from the beginning. Packard, by contrast, starts out as a good man and ends up being the villain.

Oh, and did I mention that there's a giant ape and a lot of action, chases, fights, gunfire, and monsters? Yeah, there's plenty of that too.