When I was seven I watched the original Godzilla film for the first time, and it started a life long love for monster movies. So when Kong: Skull Island came to theaters, I rushed to the box office to get my ticket.

While King Kong movies made in the past have been good, none of them drove the storyline of oversized gorilla any further. Walking in, I was skeptical that this movie would be a rinse and repeat of the other remakes. But Kong: Skull Island takes a much different approach by setting up the stage for an entire series of monster movies, as hinted throughout the film and post credit scene, which I found very exciting.

Another big positive going for Kong is the star studded cast, from the main protagonists to the side characters, almost all of them have their own personality which fleshes out during the film. There are a few exceptions to this however. For example there is one soldier, played by Toby Kabbell, who gets separated from the main group and to be honest isn’t very memorable. The movie makes an attempt to have the audience bond with him by showing a scene where he’s writing a letter to his son to make you sympathize with him. Unfortunately, while Kabbell plays the part well, his character is largely insignificant to the story, other than being an objective for the other soldiers.

The big positives are the main characters such as Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), Bill Randa (John Goodman) and my personal favorite, Hank Marlow (John C. Riley). The part that makes these characters so unique is that they are the most fleshed out of the bunch, and carry a good back story. For example, Packard(Samuel L. Jackson’s character), is a grizzled veteran of the Vietnam War. While everyone else in his unit celebrates going home, Packard feels incomplete and longs for one last mission to complete. You can see how his character changes from a caring, and resourceful leader, to a monster after his first encounter with Kong.

This movie has many different moods throughout it, such as the politics of putting together the expedition to the island, from the gung-ho helicopter scene, to tense survival mode in the jungles of Skull Island, making the movie fast paced and full of emotion.

To wrap things up, the final battle between Kong and the giant reptilian monster called Skullcrawler, was worth the price of admission alone and utilizes the best CGI graphics I have seen in years. Overall Kong: Skull Island is an excellent start to what hopefully will be a whole universe of monster films that I would recommend to anyone who loves a good action adventure movie, or is a old fan of King Kong.