IN “Kong: Skull Island,” director Jordan Vogt-Roberts marries a hokey retro plot with state-of-the-art technology, ripping pages out of “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon” and planting them on the face of “Jurassic Park” for a 1971-set expedition undertaken by the U.S. military and several hangers-on to Skull Island, King Kong’s remote tropical home.

    With its cursory set-up and characterizations and over-reliance on wholly-CGI set-pieces, “Kong: Skull Island” naturally skews towards younger, male audiences. And in the battleground of Kong’s birthplace, Skull Island, it’s the actors who come away bruised. While Brie Larson’s photojournalist is a warm presence which no amount of cod-dialogue can cool, and John C. Reilly provides a reliable comedy port in this storm as a castaway, Kong doesn’t show much career mercy to either Samuel L. Jackson or Tom Hiddleston playing dual leads.

    Jackson is saddled with a Colonel Kurtz-like character, a battle-scarred Vietnam vet obsessed with vengeance, while Hiddleston as a special forces operative seems to have wandered from another film entirely, lost, perhaps, on his way to the casino. Nevertheless, both have enough star armor to emerge with their reputations intact after this story of a reconnaissance trip to Skull Island (“a place where myth and science meet!”) led by John Goodman’s shadowy private firm and backed by the U.S. military.

    It takes Vogt-Roberts (indie feature King of Summer) and his team scant time to introduce Kong in a prologue and move an ensemble cast through the bars of Da Nang and Saigon, onto a ship and into helicopters through a “perpetual storm system” to land on Skull island. No surprise then, that their characters are reduced to one-line descriptions in some throwaway expository dialogue, set up to be dispatched one-by-one with familiar inevitability. It is somewhat unexpected that Vogt-Williams avoids romantic interplay between Larsen and Hiddleston, but in fairness, he doesn’t have much time. And audiences are there for the beasts, after all, as opposed to the beast with two backs.

    On his way, the director and his team lift iconic imagery from both “Platoon” and in particular “Apocalpyse Now.” Helicopters are framed in relief against the flaming sun and soldiers make their way in formation through the jungle before getting on a makeshift PBR in an attempt to escape – because their inexplicable decision to set off explosives all over the island hasn’t just irritated Kong, it has woken up the prehistoric Skullcrawlers which live under the surface. But Vogt-Williams does add some touches of his own, including some nice monster-rage sequences shot from the perspective of the victim trapped inside a helicopter cockpit.

    If the film belongs to anyone, it’s creature designer Carlos Huante. Kong is expressive and impressive, both in hair and full-body movement, and his interaction — with water, humans, other animals – is consistently fluid from a technological perspective, with actor Terry Notary also convincing as the beast. Even his hair, shaggy, like a wet terrier, is a notable technical scale-up. And if it belongs to a place, that’s Ha Long Bay and the previously-unexplored rivers of Vietnam, although the movie also shot in Hawaii and Queensland, Australia.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)