"Kong: Skull Island" from 2017 is apparently one of several "MonsterVerse" films, which reboot the Godzilla and King Kong franchises. I´ve only seen the 2017 flick, in which a secretive group of maverick scientists working for the US deep state get more than they ask for. The year is supposedly 1973 (yet, everyone looks more modern - or less, in some cases). The classified Monarch crypto-zoology project is almost shut down due to a lack of tangible results, when a satellite discovers Skull Island, an unknown territory in the middle of the Pacific surrounded by almost impenetrable storms. Monarch´s team of monster-hunters and heretical geologists (one of them an academic outcast who believes in the Hollow Earth theory) are joined by US military personnel from the Vietnam War on an expedition to investigate the site. What happens next is easy to imagine, LOL.
Or perhaps not, since the main twist of "Kong: Skull Island" is that King Kong is one of the *good* guys. Skull Island is connected to gigantic cave systems in which prehistoric creatures still live, creatures so abominable that the Earth really belongs to them, not to humanity, if they ever decide to come up for a quick snack. Note the combo of Hollow Earth speculations and Lovecraft´s Eldritch horrors! King Kong seems to be the only monster fighting on the side of humanity against a breed of bizarre oversized reptilians known as skullcrawlers. Kong´s family was killed by the crawlers, and he is the last of his race, being worshipped by the natives of the island as a god for keeping the place reasonably safe. Due to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, Kong and the Monarch away team end up fighting each other, enabling the dinosaurid horrors to escape their underground caverns...
This isn´t *really* a good film (it would have been even worse without the huge budget!), but as lighter entertainment on a cloudy Friday afternoon, I suppose it works tolerably well.
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