Kong: Skull Island

Kong: Skull Island begins with a sly bait-and-switch.

- Nick Setchfield

As the studio idents play there’s the howl of engines and a fierce stammer of machine guns. You can’t help but imagine the original Kong in his most iconic moment: straddling the Empire State Building and clawing at a swarm of biplanes. The stop-motion monarch of Manhattan, shortly to be deposed.

Often restaged but never bettered, the classic skyscraper showdown doesn’t just define 1933’s King Kong but the flickering spell cast by cinema itself (the 1976 remake relocated the climax to the World Trade Center; Peter Jackson recreated it with a digital sheen in 2005). Tellingly, it’s nowhere to be found in Hollywood’s latest revival of the first great movie monster.

The planes and the gunfire? A dogfight over the South Pacific, a breathless pre-titles tease that introduces Skull Island and the mighty paw that rules it. And this time the Eighth Wonder of the World stays firmly jungle bound. Finally someone listened to that dame in the original film: “Ain’t we got enough gorillas in New York already?”

Building on the Monsterverse initiated by 2014’s