SKULL ISLAND: Season 1 Review

Skull Island (2023): Season 1 Review

 

In 2021 I watched my first complete season of an anime TV show, and this marks another minorly historic moment, because I’ve just finished only my second-ever complete season of an anime. A couple years ago I reviewed the Godzilla anime from Toho, Godzilla Singular Point, and now it’s time for me to talk about Skull Island: the first TV series set in the MonsterVerse (Legendary Pictures’ shared universe of Godzilla and Kong movies, which continues next year with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire). This was almost the third kaiju-centric anime show I watched. I tried watching the Pacific Rim anime on Netflix, Pacific Rim: The Black, but I just couldn’t get into it and never finished the first season. Like that show, Skull Island is an American-produced animated series in the style of traditional anime, and all episodes were dropped at once on Netflix just a couple weeks ago. To refresh, I didn’t really enjoy Godzilla Singular Point. It was full of bland talking scenes, mostly about made-up science, and skimped out on monster battles—most egregiously of all side-lining Big G himself. Skull Island is a totally different beast of a show, but this one I actually quite enjoyed.

This is not the first time King Kong has been on television. Though most famous for the original 1933 film, two remakes, and a Japanese version that fought Godzilla and Mechani-Kong (a robot version of Kong), the Kong TV programming includes The King Kong Show from the 1960’s, which was a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for three seasons, then much later there was Kong: The Animated Series from the early 2000’s, which was made to compete with Godzilla: The Animated Series and lasted a couple seasons, and finally Kong: King of the Apes, which had two seasons on Netflix and is still the only 3D-animated Kong show. I’ve never seen the one from the 60’s, but recently I watched half of Kong: The Animated Series season one for the first time since I was a kid, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s still pretty entertaining, if a bit dated, goofy, and cheap at times. The Kong: King of the Apes premise and style didn’t work for me, and it was too focused on being child-friendly. Skull Island is the first Kong series not to be aimed at children. I think kids will still enjoy it, but it’s definitely more mature and more overtly violent, which helps make it fit in with the overall MonsterVerse.

One of the only things that stuck with me about Godzilla Singular Point was the opening credit intro and theme music. Skull Island has a different approach: it doesn’t have an intro. Each episode has an image related to the episode that the title fades in around, and it zooms into the image, immersing viewers back into the show. There are eight episodes in this first season, almost all of which are about 20 minutes long—a much tighter runtime than Singular Point’s overinflated 13 episodes. Looking back on it, Skull Island season one kind of plays like an extended movie broken up into pieces, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. I won’t compare Skull Island to Singular Point any further, simply because they really aren’t that comparable, and Skull Island is telling a completely different kind of story set in an already-established universe that began Kong’s story in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. I didn’t love that movie, either. I will be comparing this show to that movie, though, because Skull Island does several things much better than the first film in the MonsterVerse to star the Eighth Wonder of the World.

First of all, as the title alludes to, this isn’t really a show about King Kong. Yes, he’s in it, and he plays an important role later in the story, but we already know who Kong is, we know what he’s all about, and so the show cleverly focuses on his home, the infamous Skull Island, and a group of characters who become stranded there. We have Charlie and Mike, two teenage boys whose fathers work together on a ship in search of strange lands and unknown creatures. Mike spots a teenage girl named Annie adrift at sea, who is shown escaping from her captors on another ship at the start of the series. Not long after Charlie rescues Annie, the ship is attacked by a giant Kraken-like monster, and Charlie and Mike find themselves on an island overrun with dangerous monsters. They have to figure out how to reunite with the other survivors, as well as solve the mystery of Annie, who knows a lot about Skull Island and has a pet dog, which isn’t a regular dog, it’s a mix of a bulldog and a lion with spikes and giant claws…but its name is just Dog. It’s not very creative, but it’s OK, they make a joke about her lack of creativity. Even with the joke, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still unoriginal. I’ll discuss the show’s use of humour in a bit, but let me continue with the plot and characters first.

I had to look up when this show was set, because it’s clearly quite a while after the 1970’s setting of Kong: Skull Island, but not that close to when Godzilla vs. Kong is set, because the island was in a very different condition by that film. It takes place in the 1990’s, but you can’t tell when it’s supposed to be taking place, and I think this is to the show’s credit, not discredit. There’s something kind of timeless about the way this story is told—the characters look, act, and sound modern enough, but are not distinctly part of 90’s culture. Having it set almost exclusively on the island helps with this, too, because aside from guns and a bit of tech, they don’t really have much with them, and have to rely on their wits and cooperation to survive.

Without spoiling too much, two characters who seem like they’re going to be pretty important get killed before the end of the first episode. There are a couple more surprising deaths throughout the season, but none that live up to the ones in the premiere. This episode is just about establishing the characters and getting them to Skull Island, and it works quite well to get the story underway and establish the stakes early on. The characters continue to get development in episode two, as they begin to figure out where they’ve become shipwrecked, and the main duo of Charlie and Mike are quite funny, with jokes and quips and humourous jabs. I found them quite likable protagonists, but the character of Annie takes a bit longer to warm up to. I won’t spoil too much about the mystery surrounding her character, but she becomes more likable later in the season once you have a bit more context as to why she’s fighting against seemingly everyone and where she came from.

Episode three is when we get King Kong for the first time, and pacing-wise, it’s perfect—not too late into the series and not too early either—but the way he’s introduced unfortunately reminds me of Kong: Skull Island in an unfavourable way. He acts as a deus ex machina and saves Charlie and Mike from certain death, then just walks away, and isn’t seen again for a while. The characters are not particularly awe-struck by him, either, they make a joke about “the big monkey” and this is when the humour started to wear a little thin. There are quite a few jokes from multiple characters in the first few episodes, and the tension in certain situations is relieved by the funny moments. These moments are intentional, but I did find the humour less forced and less abundant in the later episodes, which was appreciated. It’s not that I disliked the show for trying to be funny—in fact, I think a lot of the humour works—but there could have been a better balance, and not every character has to be a master at quips.

By the halfway point of the season, I found another issue with the show. I feel like Skull Island isn’t actually that dangerous in the first few episodes, despite what the characters keep saying about it. In the original movie (and the 2005 remake) setting foot on Skull Island is like playing with fire—just sticking your hand right into the burning flames—but in this show it’s like playing with a smoldering stick. Sure, the threats are present, but the majority of characters are able to avoid them without too much trouble. I found this issue went away though in the second half of the season. There are some brutal moments with people getting killed or eaten and with the monsters fighting, which I found were great reminders that this isn’t a show just for kids.

It’s around the midway point of the season where the story takes a slight turn and splits some of the characters up and brings some others together, which rejigs the dynamics (in a good way) and brings Kong into the story in a bigger way. Episode six is where we start to see more of Dog’s back story (which, I must admit, did make me like him more), but this episode is a bit lighter on action—though I can’t cite that as a complaint, given the episode that immediately follows. Episode seven is the Kong episode, flashing back to many years before the current storyline for nearly the entire runtime. It’s perhaps my favourite episode from the whole season. It characterizes Kong quite well and delivers some great monster action. The season finale gives us the Kong action that was teased at the end of the previous episode, and it’s a thrilling finale, with the owner of those big tentacles from episode one finally revealed in full for a titanic battle (pun intended).

Overall, I think Skull Island works quite well as an animated MonsterVerse series. Having Kong come in later in the story in a meaningful way is exactly what Kong: Skull Island should have done, but instead that movie had nothing for the giant ape to do. The characters are not generic action heroes, and while I wouldn’t say they’re particularly great characters, the voice actors do a good job and the dialogue isn’t too annoying (aside from some of those jokes). On the surface, it’s pretty comparable to the traditional King Kong story, and at times it plays out like a typical Hollywood action movie. It definitely hits some familiar beats, and some of the action has a been-there-done-that quality, but I found there was just enough ingenuity for the characters and monsters to make it feel enough like its own thing. The whole show was written and developed by Brian Duffield, who has written screenplays and directed films before this, and I think it shows (in good and not so good ways) but I think it’s cool to see a whole eight episodes of a season of a show written by the same guy. I think it’s a big part of the reason for much of the season’s consistency.

The two last things I have to comment on are Kong himself and the other inhabitants of Skull Island. While I still prefer pre-MonsterVerse versions of Skull Island with primarily prehistoric inhabitants, this show features many more interesting examples of monsters and creepy crawlies than what was seen in Kong: Skull Island. It would be neat to see some of them in a live-action film in the future. As for Kong, it’s kind of curious seeing this previously live-action-only-version of him represented in this animation style. I like the show's animation and art style for the most part, but Kong looks a little funky (a funky monkey?) and it’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly why. One part of the issue is the lack of scale. I know intrinsically that he’s huge, but the way the characters are framed makes it difficult to tell just how big or small things are sometimes. These are minor technical criticisms, though. Overall, the visual style is good, and the rest of the designs are fitting.

Skull Island is what I wished Kong: Skull Island had been in the first place: a story set on the island with interesting characters that doesn’t rely on King Kong to anchor it. I’ll definitely be watching season two (the story is not resolved at the end) and recommend it to anyone who has been a fan of the MonsterVerse films thus far.