Netflix’s Skull Island captures the best part of Kong’s world

polygon.com:

The structure of a King Kong story hasn’t changed much in the last 90 years: People find a big gorilla on an island, the gorilla falls in love with a girl and is taken to the big city, the gorilla escapes, and then the gorilla plunges to his death from somewhere really tall. The 1933 original and 1976 and 2005 remakes all follow this blueprint, but pieces are scattered around other flicks, too, from the connections with people (Son of Kong, King Kong Escapes, Kong: Skull Island) to Kong being removed from his home (King Kong vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Kong,) to the violent demise (King Kong Lives revives Kong with a damn heart transplant just to kill him off again by the end of the flick.)

With such a pre-destined trajectory for our most beloved giant movie apes, directors and crew of the movies are only really free to go bananas in the portions devoted to Skull Island, Kong’s homeland. There they can concoct all sorts of locations, creatures and situations to fill the ape’s world, from the prehistoric to the fantastical. And with the new Netflix cartoon, Skull Island, being almost solely set there, it gives the show a chance to absolutely bathe in that sense of delightful (and often bloody) freedom.

Being a part of the “MonsterVerse,” the shared universe featuring Godzilla and Kong as lead figures in an MCU-esque arrangement, means that Skull Island, created by Brian Duffield (Love and Monsters) is tied to the rules of the live-action expanded universe — so don’t expect to see the Lost World of dinosaurs from the 1933 film or Peter Jackson’s remake. Instead, the show’s monsters, as Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts once put it, feel “realistic and could exist in an ecosystem that feels sort of wild and out