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 Why isn't there a thread on Kong: Skull Island yet? Personally I like how the movie represents the self defeating nature of trying to defeat a guerrilla movement through overwhelming force with a literal giant gorilla who can't be beat.
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Mar 12, 2017 19:57
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 07:42 |
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Saw it yesterday and well it actually wasn't as terrible as I thought it was going to be. I really liked John C Riley.
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Mar 12, 2017 21:27
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Like Godzilla the parts I liked about it were super good and enough to offset the things that I either disliked or were rough as hell. Loved the cinematography (some shots were just totally masturbatory but pulp as gently caress so I forgive them), loved the creature design, loved Reilly and Jackson. They totally nailed "this is not our island and we need to get the gently caress off". Most of what I had problems with were plot bits that felt weird but that might just be me. Bunch of deaths felt pointless like whatshisname who gets separated and then eaten alone with no further plot relevance when Jackson already had a motive to go in that direction, soldierman near the end whose heroic death gets totally chumped on by the big Skullcrawler which was amusing but bought his friends zero extra time. Felt like a few scenes had Jurassic World-style issues like that. Also the joke about the Skullcrawler name didn't land for me at all. It's a great name John! Overall though a fun as hell ride, gonna see if I can get some people to see it with me next time. Pierson fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Mar 12, 2017 |
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Mar 12, 2017 22:22
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Pierson posted:Like Godzilla the parts I liked about it were super good and enough to offset the things that I either disliked or were rough as hell. Loved the cinematography (some shots were just totally masturbatory but pulp as gently caress so I forgive them), loved the creature design, loved Reilly and Jackson. They totally nailed "this is not our island and we need to get the gently caress off". To the stuff you spoilered: Both work to undercut some of the mythology surrounding the greatness of the military, which is central to this movie and its themes. The guy who tries to sacrifice himself gets chumped because the giant skullcrawler represents [war, etc] and you can't stop war by doing heroic war things. You just end up dead in war. Similarly, it's important that the desire to leave no man behind is just a cover for revenge. It's a noble-sounding myth that Packard uses to get the rest of the soldiers (and the LANDSAT guy) to aid him in his quest for bloody revenge. And Packard is definitely a guy who wants eternal war.
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Mar 12, 2017 23:05
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Quite good really. Setting it in the 70s was a great idea because you get some very cool aesthetics and the Vietnam era military gear. It's a little rickety in terms of how it establishes the many groups of people involved but I appreciated their ability to make them memorable considering how many there were. They craft a distinct survival vs revenge split and just run with it. Kong is great and shown quickly. They've got nice Skull Island monsters to overwhelm people, and I like their method of relating the mythology and hinting at unspoken backstory. It's unfortunate that Peter Jackson's Kong was a little to bloated to recommend because it does have an edge on big monster fights. But this is a really solid adventure film and makes me happy to see where the post credits sequence will lead.
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Mar 12, 2017 23:13
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Also I'm shocked I forgot to mention the best character, taken from us far too soon: Bobblehead Nixon. That guy needs more work.Hand Knit posted:To the stuff you spoilered:
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Mar 12, 2017 23:42
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Skull Island rules, basically. It's just an obliquely farcical fantasy movie that interestingly pays homage much more to the less innocent kitsch of Kong '76 and King Kong Escapes. It works really well as a Verhoeven-meets-Spielberg type prequel to Godzilla, but is also just straight up another great kaiju film in its own right. Still not as good as Monsters: Dark Continent, but it is very good.
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Mar 13, 2017 00:20
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The trailers almost make it look Mist-esque, how much grody monster stuff is there because I might get to see this in 70mm.
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Mar 13, 2017 00:22
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I didn't like it much. Apart from Riley and a little bit of Jackson, the performances were incredibly flat. If anything it's improved my opinion of PJ's movie. Now if I only had 8 hours to test that out.
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Mar 13, 2017 00:25
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The trailers almost make it look Mist-esque, how much grody monster stuff is there because I might get to see this in 70mm. It's just a totally bleak Starship Troopers-esque scenario - it's crazy that some of it is PG-13. Kong eats a dude. It's only implied - but he eats at least one dude. Teenage Fansub posted:I didn't like it much. Apart from Riley and a little bit of Jackson, the performances were incredibly flat. Skull Island is way better than '05, it's not even really a contest. Not the least because it's a humane length.
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Mar 13, 2017 00:31
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K. Waste posted:It's just a totally bleak Starship Troopers-esque scenario - it's crazy that some of it is PG-13. Kong eats a dude. It's only implied - but he eats at least one dude. oh hot macro vore i'm down
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Mar 13, 2017 00:31
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The trailers almost make it look Mist-esque, how much grody monster stuff is there because I might get to see this in 70mm.
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Mar 13, 2017 00:46
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Will try and see it tomorrow. Hopefully I'll survive the giant spider scene.
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Mar 13, 2017 02:10
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This was a Very Good Ape Movie. It really finds a good balanced tone between the tension, the humor, and the spectacle. There are some legit good scares and a sense that at anytime something might leap out and kill people, but it's not quite Aliens-level grueling. The humor never completely undercuts the "reality" of the situation, Reilly in particular doing a good job stopping short of full Steve Bruehl. (As funny as that would be and I would bet money there are some great alternate takes out there.) Kong gets a lot of personality, and I like that a lot of the final battle is about him knowing the use of simple tools, like apes do. This is very much a movie that earns the sight of John C. Reilly drawing a sword and intoning "Death before dishonor" in Japanese. Also, Brie Larson with 70s hair going all Ellen Ripley, yes and thank you.
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Mar 13, 2017 02:55
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K. Waste posted:Skull Island rules, basically. It's just an obliquely farcical fantasy movie that interestingly pays homage much more to the less innocent kitsch of Kong '76 and King Kong Escapes. It works really well as a Verhoeven-meets-Spielberg type prequel to Godzilla, but is also just straight up another great kaiju film in its own right. I have to disagree in one respect; Verhoeven never directed anything this punchy. Skull Island's somewhere between early Zack Snyder and George Miller doing Fury Road. The cheerful-bittersweet ending's along the lines of Chewie not getting a medal in Star Wars: A New Hope - nothing too sardonic. The tone and themes are summed up in the joke where everyone quietly imagines that Neil Armstrong never came back - that he's still up there, eating SPAM.
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Mar 13, 2017 03:32
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Hand Knit posted:Both work to undercut some of the mythology surrounding the greatness of the military, which is central to this movie and its themes. The guy who tries to sacrifice himself gets chumped because the giant skullcrawler represents [war, etc] and you can't stop war by doing heroic war things. You just end up dead in war. Similarly, it's important that the desire to leave no man behind is just a cover for revenge. It's a noble-sounding myth that Packard uses to get the rest of the soldiers (and the LANDSAT guy) to aid him in his quest for bloody revenge. And Packard is definitely a guy who wants eternal war. This stuff is astute, and I wanna tie it in with what the OP said about "the self defeating nature of trying to defeat a guerrilla movement" as well as the surprisingly effective credits scenes. Packard isn't the only guy around who "wants eternal war" - I mean, the very first scene after the opening titles is the Monarch crew lamenting how the end of the Vietnam War spells doom for their organization. Setting the movie right after the end of Vietnam isn't just a commentary on that war being a failure, it's a commentary on the very process of defining "failure" and "success" in the aftermath of that level of loss of life Packard's fuckup isn't that he demands victory or nothing, it's that he defines "victory" in terms of unassailable battlefield conquest, of defining the specific entity you want to kill and killing it. That's the folly - that there was never anything in Vietnam, nor in subsequent US military adventures, that actually serve as that kind of unambiguously positive stopping point. Endless mission creep is the defining characteristic of these modern wars - Hiddleston tosses Hussein's dog tags to Jackson and Jackson replies "that doesn't change a thing" So the key to "success" is then to define mission creep itself as success, and here's where we return to the dual credits scenes. Kong is easy to understand as the kind of movie where "we didn't accomplish anything" - certainly the world didn't get saved from any blockuster-assed existential thread, and most surviving characters end the movie no better than they started it. So who did move on up in the world? Reilly's character, for one, who got to have the most warmly-lit, apple-pie-looking, best-case-scenario reunion with his family. It's no coincidence that he's our lone relic of WWII, the last American war where we were able to define its outcomes in terms of these unambiguous patriotic success stories without getting laughed out of the room. His fate represents the ideal that the movers and shakers behind these wars aspire to create or to, at the very least, sell So that's one, and he gets the mid-credits scene. Which leaves the post-credits scene, about the success story of... Monarch. Three cheers for these guys, right? They were roundly dismissed at the start of the movie, nearly powerless, facing probable closure, but now we see that in the wake of the movie's events they're mighty enough to toss our protagonists into a black site! Which exposes, in a sense, the limits of understanding Vietnam as unwinnable, a black eye, a national embarrassment, and so on. To those who approach it from any kind of moral framework, yes, obviously. But to those who wield the power to make war and to draw sustenance off war, not really? Vietnam soured the immediate public appetite for a very specific kind of war, but it wasn't really too long until Reagan started backing nun-targeting death squads and the like. It sure as hell didn't do any lasting damage to the influence of the military industrial complex So it goes with Monarch. They adapt, trading in the brusque and callous Goodman for the bookish and considerate Hawkins, and in doing so they secure their ability to continually create and profit from circumstances in which people are killed for little overt benefit. Like, flash forward forty years and these guys still aren't poo poo on the kaiju scale! Serizawa's a step ahead of the navy in Godzilla '14 and all, but he's still outclassed on actual understanding of Gojira by a 6-year-old boy and his contributions to solving the actual conflict are negligible. But he's there, God dammit, and operating with enough authority to have a private and gravitas-riddle audience with an admiral, and that's exactly how we define military success by this point. Sending our brave troops home to a loving family and a beloved baseball franchise is just how we pretend to define it What I'm trying to say here is, Good Ape Film
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Mar 13, 2017 03:33
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I think it was just fair. Some of the battles were neat but it felt hollow because it's obvious that the only reason the movie exists is to set up a monsterverse. John Goodman was a complete waste, the Japanese girl was only there because of future movies, and everyone else was mainly bland other than Reilly. His character came dangerously close to being annoying comic relief but he was still fairly endearing. I don't think they really went anywhere with Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson's characters. I watched the '33 Kong on Friday and the '76 version tonight and I don't know that it compares all that well with either one. Skull Island in '76 is lame as hell, but the non-Kong parts are a more entertaining movie than this one. I'm not really complaining, but it's kind of amusing how modern weapons instantly rips Kong to shreds in '76 but this version basically shrugs it off (they need to make him impossibly tough to handle radioactive giant lizards and three-headed space dragons in the future). And it's amazing that a 1933 movie still blows this one away in production design. These monsters felt a bit perfunctory and I didn't really care for the skullcrawlers all that much.
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Mar 13, 2017 03:44
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You're completely off base. The actress is Chinese and she's there to sell the film overseas.
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Mar 13, 2017 04:01
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The major failure of Vietnam was they were unable to find a way to keep it going forever - the government could take tips from Marvel.
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Mar 13, 2017 04:10
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Great movie - and even greater setup of future kaiju films.
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Mar 13, 2017 09:21
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david_a posted:the Japanese girl was only there because of future movies She was only there because of the Chinese financing.
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Mar 13, 2017 09:31
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Pierson posted:Also I'm shocked I forgot to mention the best character, taken from us far too soon: Bobblehead Nixon. That guy needs more work. Upside down Bobblehead Nixon is the best shot in the film. Also I just remembered another detail about the guy who gets chumped. He's the guy who thought that the story about the mouse and the lion was that the mouse figured out a way to kill the lion. So, uh, I guess his wrongness is made kinda literal. Jenny Angel posted:What I'm trying to say here is, Good Ape Film Good Ape Film indeed
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Mar 13, 2017 12:39
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This movie wasn't on my radar at all until I heard the director has also been given Metal Gear Solid to adapt. Now I want to see it just to get a sense of his style.
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Mar 13, 2017 15:57
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How much of the movie has giant spiders? My girlfriend is arachnophobic, and is worried about that.
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Mar 13, 2017 16:19
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Boz0r posted:How much of the movie has giant spiders? My girlfriend is arachnophobic, and is worried about that. One scene, maybe 5 minutes on screen.
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Mar 13, 2017 16:26
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Speaking of spiders, that was a brutal death and fight
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Mar 13, 2017 18:10
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Mantis42 posted:Personally I like how the movie represents the self defeating nature of trying to defeat a guerrilla movement through overwhelming force with a literal giant gorilla who can't be beat. But the military would have won. The real lesson they learned is that the guerilla movement isn't their actual enemy.
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Mar 13, 2017 18:22
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Samuel Clemens posted:But the military would have won. The real lesson they learned is that the guerilla movement isn't their actual enemy. "Sometimes there isn't an enemy until you create one," or whatever. Contrasted with Marlow's comment that Gunpei and he stopped being enemies as soon as they took off their uniforms.
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Mar 13, 2017 19:33
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I thought it was interesting that John C. Reilly felt like the most complete character in the movie. I expected him to be nothing but comic relief, but he was enjoyable and had a nice progression through the film. Jackson and Goodman's characters are the next most well-developed, while Larson and Hiddleston end up being paper-thin. I think they both get like one or two lines that tell you anything about them. I loved the scene where Kong finishes destroying the choppers and Packard stares him down through the flames. Packard was a man who didn't want the war to end, and he found one more enemy to fight. I think that in the end his hesitation to finish off Kong was motivated less by ensuring the safety of Weaver and Conrad and more because he didn't want the fight to be over yet. And it wasn't until the big skullcrawler appeared that he realized there were other foes left in the world.
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Mar 13, 2017 19:40
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Usually I'm with CineD on stuff but I thought this movie was wildly uneven and ultimately I didn't like it. I felt the anti-war stuff was totally hollow - the movie ends with a big martial brawl so clearly violence is the answer sometimes (yeah, I got the text that weapons were useless against nature). I don't know. Still working my thoughts out but: Not A Great Ape Film. An Uneven Ape Film.
Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 20:50
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:See it On Video Ape Film. I don't know, one of those movies that, even if you don't love it, plays well on a big screen.
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Mar 13, 2017 20:56
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Sir Kodiak posted:I don't know, one of those movies that, even if you don't love it, plays well on a big screen. Oh right, that's true. I'll remove that.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:03
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I didn't love it but I got a heck of a lot of enjoyment out of it. Good Ape Film, looking forwards to future sequels. Although I have to say that it felt odd watching a Kong film where he doesnt die at the end even though I was aware that this film was pretty much just setting up the Monsterverse so Kong surviving was pretty much the main reason the film even exists. But even Kong seemed to be a bit nonplussed about the fact that he was just left at the end, standing around growling at the retreating humans like some kind of 100ft tall moping wallflower. It also felt a bit weird that Kong was rewritten as a protector of humanity similar to some older versions of Godzilla although I guess that makes a lot of sense in this new Monsterverse context. I was also pleasantly surprised that John C Reilly's character wasn't 100% comedy relief like I'd been expecting from the trailers. Hiddleston was incredibly flat and his character could have been left out altogether without affecting the movie at all.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:35
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Hiddleston was incredibly flat and his character could have been left out altogether without affecting the movie at all. But he did a fantastic job of striking a heroic pose in just about every shot he was in.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:45
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howe_sam posted:But he did a fantastic job of striking a heroic pose in just about every shot he was in. The movie is very clear that he and Brie Larson were hired to look good on-camera, while Jackson, Goodman, and Reilly were hired to act. Which is not, you know, too crazy a decision to make.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:57
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Great visuals, great homages to Apocalypse Now. Great looking movie all around. Good monsters and good final fight. Was John Goodman's backstory supposed to imply that Godzilla destroyed his ship during WWII, or some other famous Kaiju that I ought to knw? Maxwell Lord posted:Reilly in particular doing a good job stopping short of full Steve Bruehl. (As funny as that would be and I would bet money there are some great alternate takes out there.) Well, his jacket does say "For Your Health" on it.
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Mar 13, 2017 22:21
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Chairman Capone posted:Was John Goodman's backstory supposed to imply that Godzilla destroyed his ship during WWII, or some other famous Kaiju that I ought to knw? No you nailed it. Here's another thing that probably influenced me negatively: I had just watched Peter Jackson's King Kong V-Rex fight and I felt like the ending sequence was aping it (pun intended). Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 22:33
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The scene where they flew into the storm seemed like it was directly taking from Fury Road.
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Mar 13, 2017 22:37
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Mantis42 posted:The scene where they flew into the storm seemed like it was directly taking from Fury Road. The bobble-head gimmick also ties them together, but the imagery of warriors or explorers marching on into a chaotic void is pretty generic adventure/creature-feature material, already. Obviously, it goes back to the persistent re-referencing of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but it's also not that different from the opening of, say, The Land Unknown. (Or Alien/Aliens.)
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Mar 13, 2017 22:40
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 07:42 |
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Jacksons speech during that was pretty drat good. What an amazing loving voice. The old cliche "read a phone book" applies to him.
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Mar 13, 2017 22:56
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