Tear Jerker / Kong: Skull Island

• As reprehensible as he becomes throughout the film, there is something genuinely tragic about Packard. At the end of the day, he is a man suffering from PTSD from a war his superiors sent him into and then pulled him out of due to public pressure and the cost of life. You can clearly see how broken he is when his men are celebrating their impending return home while he has nothing to go home to. Perhaps the saddest moment is when he opens a box containing all his war medals and asks, "All this for what?".
• Marlow's speech about how he and Gunpei Ikari became friends before his death. He almost sounds like he doesn't want to leave the island because it would mean abandoning someone who went from being his enemy in the war to being his closest friend.
  Marlow: This man's name was Gunpei Ikari. But you take away the uniforms and the war, and he became my brother. And we swore we'd never leave each other behind.
  • It becomes even sadder when you realize that unlike Marlow, Ikari's family will never know what became of him.
    • I mean, Marlow could, literally, just tell them.
• Marlow's goodbye to the Iwi is also played with similar sorrow. While he's glad to be finally going home, it's clear he truly came to love them as family and will miss them dearly.
• The fact that Kong is actually a teenager in this movie whose parents died recently. He's essentially a kid who has had to grow up fast and become the protector of Skull Island. It makes his reaction to Randa bombing his home seem very understandable if not completely justified.
• Packard's men finding the letters Billy Chapman was writing to his family before his death.
  Mills: Dear Billy. Your dad was one of the best to ever do it.
• The vulnerability in Kong's eyes in his scene with Conrad and Weaver. In that moment, Kong is not a god or a force of nature. He is simply a very lonely creature.
• Cole's story about how he acquired his signature AKM from a farmer fighting for the NVA.
  "He surrendered right after we leveled his village. He was 50 years old — said he'd never even seen a gun 'til we showed up. Sometimes, an enemy doesn't exist till you go looking for one."
• Cole's death, which brings Mills to tears.