The opening scene of Kong: Skull Island tells audiences everything they need to know about the movie. It’s 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific. The camera follows first an American, and then a Japanese plane as they crash on a pristine beach. The enemy pilots continue their battle on land, locked in hand-to-sword combat, and they eventually stumble into the nearby jungle. The two grapple one another to the ground by the edge of a cliff, where, just before the American is about to feel cold steel pressed through his forehead, their fight is interrupted by the hands and face of an ape thirty stories tall.

As the shot pulls back, giving a full view of Kong, moviegoers (and the screenwriters) forget about any questions the preceding events may have raised, focusing instead on the king of the apes in all of his gargantuan computer-generated glory.

Similar sequences recur throughout the film, and, as a result, anyone setting out to evaluate Kong: Skull Island using a rubric suggested by the standard conventions of intelligent filmmaking will be forced to admit that it is a hot mess. The plot has more holes than a teenager in a slasher movie, most of its characters exist for no other reason than to be smashed or dismembered by Skull Island’s megafauna, and its political message is as incoherent as Trump’s twitter feed.