There is nothing wrong with Kong: Skull Island. It will never be remembered as a masterpiece, but as a slab of summer entertainment it is witty, visually inventive and unwilling to outstay its welcome. It is basically a really expensive Sharknado made by people with functioning adult attention spans, and, as such, probably qualifies as the second-best King Kong film ever made.
However, that didn’t stop YouTube channel CinemaSins from recently devoting 19 and a half minutes to destroying the film in a video called Everything That’s Wrong With Kong: Skull Island. If you’ve never seen one of these videos before, their sole purpose is to pick apart films in excruciating detail. For example, some of the things the video found wrong with Skull Island include a title card that reads “Bangkok Thailand” instead of just “Bangkok”, a dolly-zoom near the end and the fact that Samuel L Jackson spoke some lines in his normal cadence. In total, CinemaSins found 146 things wrong with the film, and a million and a half people apparently had enough free time to hear them all listed. So far, so internet.
But then the Skull Island director waded in. Over the course of many, many tweets this week, Jordan Vogt-Roberts took issue with the video. Responding to the “sin” about all the rain machines, Vogt-Roberts wrote “Literally not another scene in the film has rain in it after this”. He pointed out where the video’s makers had misidentified characters. He patiently explained a joke involving a match cut. And then, in conclusion, he compared CinemaSins to Donald Trump and said the video made him want to “hammer a nail through my dick”.
Couple of things I want to say regarding cinema sins, the misuse of the word "satire" and a few more things. I need to put a bow on this.
— Jordan Vogt-Roberts (@VogtRoberts) August 16, 2017
And, honestly, it’s about time someone stepped in. The “everything wrong with” genre of YouTubing isn’t clever or incisive. Worse, it isn’t even very funny. It aspires to the giddy exasperation of Honest Trailers or the How Did This Get Made? podcast, where bad films are trashed in a playful and entertaining manner. It also aspires to the pointlessly comprehensive continuity error sites, where the geekiest, most observant people in the world go to great pains to point out that the volume of drink in a glass increased by a third of a millimetre between shots, 17 minutes and 36 seconds in.
But in truth, these videos fall woefully short of both. They don’t seem to be made by people who understand or even like film very much. One of CinemaSins’ weirdest quirks, for example, is that it can’t decide whether it loves or hates exposition. Again and again throughout the Skull Island video, the complaint is made that characters spend time explaining the rules of the film, even though that isn’t a criticism in the video about The Matrix (the narrator’s favourite film, 85 sins), despite that film being about 60% exposition. And, then again, its Mad Max: Fury Road video (96 sins) is riddled with wheedling “why is this happening?” complaints whenever something visually interesting appears onscreen, as if the narrator can’t survive unless his hand is held all the way through.
Pick any film that has been given the CinemaSins treatment, and you will be swamped with egregious would-be errors. They are like watching a toddler smash a movie into its constituent parts and then throw a tantrum when they don’t fit back together again. They are mean and petty, they don’t take artistic intent into consideration and they don’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever. They are also an annoying reflection of the culture we live in, where meaningless point-scoring is worth more than considered reason. They are film criticism as tweets, delivered in the same monotonous Comic Book Guy metre over and over again until you are too tired to fight back. Perhaps Vogt-Roberts had a point. Perhaps CinemaSins is the Donald Trump of YouTube.
