The idea of seeing a giant ape, and here he is amazingly giant, laying waste to helicopters and monsters should have filled my heart with joy. As I watched this I realized that none of that matters if you don't have people in the movie. There are actors, good ones, portraying people here, but they are all cliche and inert and if I remember a single one of them a minute after writing this I would be shocked.
It does rectify the poor decisions made in GODZILLA, where they robbed us of what we came to see, mainly seeing monsters battle. Here we get Kong in all his glory, yet he is also a blank slate of a character as well. The removal of the whole beauty and the beast theme is good, but losing it we lose any sense of what makes this ape tick. It is unclear and random that he does a number of things he does and that hurts this film more than I would have thought.
I don't know how this could have been better, as a blockbuster it delivers all the spectacle that we wish for, but I feel like we as the audience deserve something smarter. All that carnage and awesomeness means little if I don't give a damn.