YMMV / Skull Island (2023)

• Adorkable:
  • Charlie is a dorky, slightly awkward and somewhat high-strung teen working on a sonography vessel, with a squeaky voice that makes him sound especially adorable when he's irate at his dad not listening to him about wanting to go to college, married to a persistent sarcastic streak.
  • Annie is a ferocious feral teenager who won't hesitate to maim you herself or set a Kaiju on you if she considers you a threat, yet she's constantly clueless about social interactions and gets various social cues adorably wrong while boasting about it, and her affectionate relationship with Dog is nothing short of endearing.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: See here.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The "too much foreshadowing" type. Irene being after Annie because she's Annie's mother was far from a surprise by the time it came out. If it didn't become obvious from all the meaningful looks and blatantly impossible-to-miss tending gestures that Irene gave Annie whenever they were in the same scene, then it was certainly obvious when Cap had a realization from watching Irene tend to Annie and exclaim "You're her-" before being cut off in the episode before the one with the reveal.
• Catharsis Factor: After everything the Kraken has done with utter malice over the course of the series — from slaughtering every human it could get its tentacles on including Kong's human loved ones just because it can, to hurling innocent marine animals across the sky, to clearly taunting and goading the grieving Kong — watching Kong tear it apart several times over in the season finale is immensely satisfying.
• Complete Monster: The Kraken is an intelligent but vicious Titan, looking to usurp Skull Island from King Kong himself. It slaughters every living thing that crosses its path, unprovoked, preventing anyone from leaving the island. Previously, the Kraken attacked and wiped out a village of people Kong was protecting, including a young woman Kong had befriended, leaving their bodies for Kong to find. The Kraken toys with its victims, playing around with an attacking Mike after killing his father; and tossing its kills at Kong's home to taunt and goad him into fighting it on its territory.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The red bird monster has been dubbed “Julieta” by some fans.
  • The final squid monster has been dubbed “Kraken” and “Squidface.”
• Fanon Discontinuity: A number of viewers think the series should have been its own original continuity, due to the large amount of Continuity Snarl, its extremely tenuous connection to the MonsterVerse (outside of a brief Skullcrawler and Sker Buffalo cameo, Kong having the same roar sound, and a vague mention of an expedition to the island in the 1970s, there's nothing directly connecting the cartoon with any other media, and a lot that disconnects it), a much more light-hearted and humorous tone than other media in the franchise, and a completely disconnected storyline.
• Fridge Brilliance: It's quite egregious that the Croc Monster strictly stays out of the river when pursuing Mike and Charlie because the boys are in the rapids leading to a giant waterfall, then after the boys have gone over the falls, the Croc freely belly-flops straight over the falls to continue its pursuit of them. It's possible that Mike and Charlie being clearly alive at the bottom of the falls after they went over gave the Croc Monster confidence it didn't have before that it too could survive going over the falls. Additionally, the Croc Monster jumped from a dry ledge over the falls instead of being carried over by the rapids, so it was likely aware it could control its fall better from the former position.
• Fridge Sadness: In a way, the death of the Island Girl really is Kong's fault, albeit in a very indirect manner that he never could have predicted in advance: the Kraken which killed her was implicitly awoken from hibernation by Kong's blood mixing into the water of its resting place, and Kong only had a bleeding wound that he needed to clean with water because he'd gotten cocky when dealing with the giant chameleons (the very incident that led to the Island Girl chiding him and falling out with him in the first place). Is it any wonder Kong is so depressed over hers and her village's deaths by the Kraken?
• Love to Hate: The Kraken. Its personality and all its actions against the cast are utterly despicable, making it highly cathartic when Kong puts the creature in the ground, yet it's anatomically and visually a very beautiful and fascinating mix-and-match marine monster to behold, and it poses a scarily powerful, competent and personal antagonistic threat to the cast whose presence can be felt very keenly and sends all humor out the window, making an effective Big Bad.
• Moral Event Horizon: It turns out that the Kraken crossed it years ago in the Whole Episode Flashback. It exterminated the village of human castaways on Skull Island's shoreline (and tellingly left their bodies uneaten), lethally wounding the Island Girl among them; and then when Kong arrived to see what the Kraken had done to his charges, the Kraken taunted him with beckoning gestures from its tentacles.
• Narm: The biggest source of criticism is how cheesy some of the dialogue is between the human characters. For many, the tonal disconnect between the mature and bloody violence with the narmy dialogue that would be more appropriate in a kids cartoon is jarring; creating massive tonal whiplash. As such, some couldn't take the series seriously at all because of this.
• Replacement Scrappy: The series uses almost none of the creatures established in the movies and other supplementary media, other than Kong (obviously) a Skullcrawler, which only appears as a glorified cameo, and a dead Sker Buffalo, in favour of having completely original critters. However, most of these are very bland, ugly, and/or generic by comparison (not helped by them having bland names like Rock Bug, Hawk Monster, or just Dog), many don't follow the same Planimal-based design philosophy, and also suggests a near-complete lack of continuity with the rest of the MonsterVerse; the Skullcrawler's very brief inclusion almost seems to be remind the audience that the series is part of the franchise, since it's otherwise impossible to tell (as even Monarch is completely absent).
• Salvaged Story: A common criticism of the MonsterVerse is that, too often, Godzilla and/or Kong need the human cast's help to finally take down the Big Bad Kaiju. While Kong does struggle against the Kraken, he manages to overcome it using his own strength and intelligence to prevail.
• Special Effect Failure: Whenever a character is shown running in a 3-D environment, it looks pretty rough due to the much less detailed CG backgrounds, the fact the characters seem to running at an unequal pace as the shot's movements, the 2-D animated models frequently clipping and overlapping with foliage that they should be behind, making it obvious it was animated on top of pre-rendered footage.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many fans complained that too many of the creatures in the series were original creations never before seen on the island, and that the Monsterverse graphic novels and other Skull Island films provided plenty of creatures to draw from- for example, the ordinary (if semi-bipedal and able to run) crocodile could have been a Sirenjaw instead, a species of Planimal crocodile already known to exist on the island, or the aloe turtle’s role could have been filled by the similar magma tortoise from the comics. Notably, no Leafwings (one of Skull Island's more notable residents from the films) appear, which is even more noticeable when Leafwings have been in every MonsterVerse film from Kong: Skull Island onward as the go-to “small flying Titan-adjacent critter”.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Dog looks like a chimeric amalgamation of a reptile, a werewolf, and a pitbull with human eyes, yet he's quite expressive and is endearingly protective and loyal to Annie. His younger appearance in Annie's flashback of their first meeting will induce a straight-up Cuteness Proximity in the viewer: he looks like a miniature, larger eyed version of the present Dog with even looser folds of skin on his forelimbs, yet his keening canine whines, his sad expressions, timid behavior, and his heartbreaking circumstances of having just lost his father and scrounging for food are all but guaranteed to make him tug on the viewer's heartstrings.
  • The baby Rock Bug in Episode 2 looks a lot less grotesque than the adult: its features are tiny to the point of obscuring the more monstrous details, it gets even closer to adorable in the dance-like way it scrambles around the Trapdoor Crabs' attacks, and it produces the cutest baby monster trills. Admit it, you were rooting for this thing when it was dodging the Crabs for dear life in its brief appearance.
  • The Aloe Turtle looks like a shriveled, part-rock turtle with ferns growing out of its back in place of a shell, and its face says nothing but "gentle, wizened, vegetarian tortoise" which is guaranteed to bring out the soft spots of anyone who loves turtles.
  • The Grass Hedgehogs look like a Maine Coon made out of moss and red grass with stubbier legs... and they meow just like a housecat, and are just as harmless to humans despite their greater size. It can be pretty upsetting to watch Kong make a snack out of one of these creatures that the Hawk Monster delivered to him alive.
• What the Hell, Costuming Department?: A rare creature design variant: The sea monster’s design combines features of both cephalopods and crustaceans in a way that is anatomically impossible even by kaiju or Mix-and-Match Critters standards. While this is far from the first instance of this in the MonsterVerse (MUTO Prime, Shinomura, Na Kika, and Amhuluk are also guilty of having impractical designs) this is by far the most egregious example, with some fans claiming that the design doesn’t even feel like the MonsterVerse, that it looks like a Skylanders Swap character, or that it looks like badly done taxidermy.
• The Woobie:
  • Mike — poor Mike. His own father is brutally crushed into visceral pulp right in front of his eyes by a monster, he's stranded on an Isle of Giant Horrors and furthermore burdened with the knowledge that it's partly his own fault that his closest remaining friends are in this situation. And to make matters worse, throughout the season, he's getting hopelessly sicker and sicker from the Kraken's venom while being constantly aware of it, to the point where he's virtually bedridden in the last couple episodes.
  • Though Annie at least has her profound friendship with Dog and the happiness he brings her to alleviate a lot of her trauma, things still aren't sunshine and rainbows for her either. She was cut off from civilization and stranded on an uncharted, monster-populated island, and her father and her now-best friend's father butchered each-other when the former was acting to save her, all when she was just six years old. Over the following ten years, Annie became practically feral to survive, then she got abducted by mercenaries and stranded on Skull Island while escaping them. And then she's confronted with the revelation that the leader of the people who've been hunting her and trying to kill her Dog is her long-lost mother trying to get her back. At the season's end, circumstances leave Annie forcibly separated from Dog and seemingly most of the new connections she made on Skull Island, with no idea what happened to them, and she's thrust back into a civilized world which she knows nothing about.
  • Irene, Annie's mother. Lost her husband and daughter to a shipwreck many years ago, and had to bury empty caskets. Then after finally tracking Annie down, Annie rejects and is angry at her over a pure misunderstanding. The pain in her eyes is evident.

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