Kong: Skull Island

Tom! Hid­dle­ston! Loves! This! Blockbuster!

It’s an amaz­ing block­buster, the most incred­i­ble block­buster you’ve ever seen. You think you’ve seen great block­busters? Try Tom Hiddleston’s block­buster before you con­tin­ue to talk about great block­busters you’ve seen in your life. (You smoth­er it in CGI after shoot­ing it on an island – that’s the thing. Also: big guns! Also: Brie! He also loves big guns and Brie!) He made this block­buster last year, after he’d filmed the final episode of the six-part minis­eries The Night Man­ag­er, which was half John le Car­ré-by-num­bers post-Cold War dra­ma, half James Bond audi­tion. He set­tled into his Con­rad role (we know…) by spend­ing his evenings work­ing out and watch­ing Apoc­a­lypse Now (we know…), which he can now con­firm is amaz­ing! and riv­et­ing! and thrilling! as every­one has said.

He must see this block­buster as part of a big­ger plan for his career, which we can only hope won’t again involve triv­i­al­is­ing the aston­ish­ing­ly bru­tal Viet­nam War. Every­one knows about Apoc­a­lypse Now, but do they know about ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’? No, and you must read it. In the book, the writer explores the hypocrisy of Colo­nial­ism, and when Tom Hid­dle­ston read it he whis­tled in admi­ra­tion. ​“Hel­lo, Impe­ri­al­ism! This is a great alle­go­ry!” He used this as the basis for his char­ac­ter in Kong: Skull Island.

Long dra­mat­ic paus­es, that’s his thing – to think stuff over, to fig­ure out his lines, to process what’s going on in this film, both the tri­umphs (“John C Reil­ly”) and the mis­steps (turn­ing a rou­tine mon­ster movie into a weird trib­ute to ​’70s Amer­i­can cin­e­ma; a load of misc CG dev­il-lizards; the occa­sion­al Bond hint; a vague allu­sion to var­i­ous indige­nous peo­ples of the South Pacif­ic). In the Viet­nam War, he says, the vio­lence was even more bru­tal than it is in ​‘Heart of Dark­ness’: It was ugly, and the con­text was key, but you couldn’t see any­thing beyond the death. It remind­ed him of the movies of old, the ones he loves so much, the movies of Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la. Apoc­a­lypse Now was a seri­ous film. Late­ly he’s not been think­ing a lot about seri­ous films.

This block­buster is start­ing to get old! He’s hav­ing a go, but it’s real­ly get­ting old!

Please don’t think he’s fail­ing by him­self being in this block­buster. Tom Hid­dle­ston is emblem­at­ic of every­thing: John Good­man (“An enor­mous man!”); his Kong direc­tor, Jor­dan Vogt-Roberts (“Such a nos­tal­gist!”); Dan Gilroy, Max Boren­stein and Derek Connolly’s screen­play (“It shows any aspir­ing Hol­ly­wood writer how you can repur­pose a great sto­ry in a deriv­a­tive way!”); Tian Jing (“Regret­table!”); Toby Kebbell in par­tic­u­lar (“That man irri­tates, boy!”); Samuel L Jack­son (“I think he’s got no integri­ty!”); Thomas Mann (“Ordi­nary!”); Richard Jenk­ins (Aver­age!”).

This is impor­tant to keep in mind while you’re watch­ing Tom Hid­dle­ston: His charm is per­ish­able. It’s one of many things that, were it not for what we know about his career choic­es, we might already know more about. For exam­ple, you will already know he’s the kind of com­pelling, ver­sa­tile actor who can leave his mark on all kinds of roles – as a dap­per pilot in The Deep Blue Sea, a Goth­ic smooth­ie in Guiller­mo del Toro’s Crim­son Peak, a charis­mat­ic folk singer in I Saw the Light – but maybe instead of this being a thing you like about Tom Hid­dle­ston, it’ll be the thing he’s least liked for.

This review is a par­o­dy of the Feb­ru­ary 2017 GQ inter­view titled ​“We ♥ T.H.”