Had I not already settled in Hanoi, Vogt-Roberts' words might have tempted me to make the overseas journey to the Quang Ninh province (where Halong Bay is located). I would have certainly pursued that beauty and grace Western media tends to use only as a backdrop for the brutality and injustice of war. Admittedly, I was drawn to Vietnam through my Kurtzian obsession with two such films, Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). I was (and still am) endlessly curious about the Vietnam War, but once I began to work closely with my Vietnamese colleagues, I guiltily admitted to myself that I was curious for the wrong reasons. Vietnam’s history and development is far more complex than what is conveyed in the Western post-war films that led me there, vital artifacts of social criticism though they remain. I simply saw a raw and unbridled country ripe for exploration, and that is now precisely what I fear when I consider how others view and interpret those films. Vietnam fights different battles now. It took me far too long to begin to understand those battles, and my place as a foreigner in this country.

Kong could have delivered a more complex picture of unfamiliar cultures and their own concerns, were the film not bogged down by ham-fisted attempts to once again portray the futility of war. Nowhere is this more glibly exemplified than in an exchange between the stranded WWII veteran Marlow (“Hey, what happened with the war? Did we win?”) and Conrad (“Which one?”). Indeed the wartime “metaphor,” (in my book, a team of active duty soldiers taking on an unknown and powerful force, in the jungle, at the tail end of the Vietnam War, barely makes the cut as a metaphor), falls completely flat and, considering the horrific toll the war took on all countries involved, is paramount to outright disrespect; or, as Collider’s Matt Goldberg put it, “The cinematic equivalent of doing skateboard tricks on the Vietnam memorial.” If Vogt-Roberts truly wanted to discover something, he should have delved deeper into his ultimately meaningless allusions to Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella famous for deconstructing colonial ideology. The references to the text's author Joseph Conrad and to its protagonist Charles Marlow are so wasted here as to exemplify the very travesty Conrad meant to decry, the “great lost opportunity to depict dialogue” between cultures, to paraphrase the Botswanan scholar Peter Mwikisa. Kong’s feeble attempt to unite the soldiers and the natives against the sinister forces of nature (the Skullcrawlers) is yet another lost opportunity.