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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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K. Waste posted: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.) I'd narrow things down and call it a Wizard Of Oz reference, akin (but superior to) the 'you're not in Kansas anymore!' cliche in Avatar. The point is less the chaotic storm than the sudden shock of the transition to daylight. Serf posted:Also it was weird to see Kong turned into a protector of humanity, especially since they're gonna bring in Mothra and that's more of her gig. Kong and Mothra have always been thematically linked, in the Toho films, by the red berry juice used by their respective Islanders. The Infant Islanders use it as a treatment and defence against radiation poisoning, while the Faro Islanders use it as a drug to pacify Kong. The Skull Islanders in this film are a sort of ambiguous mix of the two. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Mar 15, 2017 |
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Mar 15, 2017 03:42
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K. Waste posted:Here's one thing that stood out: Kong eating a squid in homage to the scene in Oldboy. Giant octopus! Also, we're talking about a movie where a collosal Sasquatch spontaneously invents & deploys the flying guillotine.
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Mar 15, 2017 04:24
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I like what you're trying to do here. ?
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Mar 15, 2017 18:28
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K. Waste posted:Godzilla and Skull Island leave little evidence that these characters would have any reason to encounter or want to fight one another. In other words, Monarch is gonna do something really stupid. I don't know; we've already seen a pretty big gulf between the two. Kong is isolationist/territorial while Godzilla's international or even global. Kong fights for family, Godzilla is indifferent. Kong is particular, Godzilla universal. Kong is good/godly while Godzilla is demonic - 'beyond good and evil'. Kong's violence is born of desire for balance, Godzilla's violence is born of pure drive, etc. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Nothing bad, I like that you're trying to link Kong to Master of the Flying Guillotine! If he had popped that fuckin' lizzo's head off I would have wilded out right there in the theater. Oh I got you; the 'trying' part threw me off. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 15, 2017 |
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Mar 15, 2017 20:40
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Gatts posted:I don't know if Godzillas violence is drive so much as he's referred to as having to bring balance and order in his own move so I'd put Kong as that given he's got more primal instincts vs Godzillas supposedly coming from some kind of mystic supernatural balancing harmony earth balance thing as an equalizer A semi-subtle point in Godzilla 2014 is that Serizawa is totally wrong. Godzilla stands for a more radical imbalance.
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Mar 16, 2017 01:52
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Basebf555 posted:I could definitely be remembering this wrong but wasn't his whole thing that he specialized in EOD or had some sort of extensive knowledge about the particular bomb they were using? It's the second: Ford was one of the few people specifically trained in how to use this uniquely monster-proof analog bomb. After all the others were killed, he was the only one who could quickly disarm it. Also, despite all this, he still failed to disarm the bomb at the end.
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Mar 23, 2017 00:59
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wdarkk posted:I feel like there's a connection between that and the line about a camera being more dangerous than a gun. It's actually the throughline of the entire film: the silent conflict between Goodman's character, who is driven to use his various cameras and sensors in an effort to expose Kong to the world, and Larson who quietly - but significantly - makes the decision to never publish her photos. (A key detail at the end: when Larson views an entire epic battle through her viewfinder, she can't bring herself to actually press the button...) This is precisely why Goodman's camera is ultimately consumed and made a part of the reptilian 'war machine.' The keyword is empathy; the constant focus on Kong's emotive eyes are a contrast to the subhuman Crawlers, that are 'beyond empathy': "When the Jaws die, nobody cry. When my Kong die, everybody cry. Everybody love my Kong: kids, women, intellectuals, all love my Kong." -Dino DeLaurientis "Y'know, the thing about a shark: he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes, like a doll's eyes." -Quint This, again, predicts the future conflict between Kong and Godzilla. Traumatized Goodman is a precursor to Brian Cranston's character in Godzilla 2014 - and therefore a precursor to Godzilla himself. He stands for the scientific drive, without empathy, the violent disruption of the island's 'natural balance', the repressed truth straining to come to the surface.... Goodman only fails, perhaps, because he is still too human. Despite being the 'mad scientist' character, he still feels bad when he sees Kong's hand.
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Mar 24, 2017 20:18
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Sir Kodiak posted:what Skull Island was going for Skull Island is an overtly farcical film - a plague of fantasies that, according to its own logic, should not be viewed by anyone. It doesn't need a 'New York' sequence because it's already the exploitation movie Carl Denham tried to make. That's why good critic Armond White unfortunately dismisses Kong as bread-and-circus spectacle, while bad critic Walter Chaw predictably derides it as 'pornographic'. But Kong is a slippery film that correctly points out that the only Vietnam War Kaiju (before now) was Doctor Manhattan - and that the best we got after that were, very much post-Vietnam, the Alien Queen and The Host. (The Skullcrawlers are a blatant reference to/ripoff of the latter, which was fought with 'Agent Yellow'.) The basic point of the film is less that the war never ended and more that it ended without resolution - endlessly danced around in art films, blockbusters and b-trash alike because no-one could conceive of a proper solution. There's unspoken but vital points about satellite communication as the birth of 'the global village', and Vietnam as the first televised war, that pin it as the point where the world just ended and alternatives became impossible. The years between the end of Vietnam and Godzilla's emergence in 'the present day' are glossed over altogether, irrelevant. So, in the meantime, the film uses its status as pure fantasy to toy around with various strategies, both their appeal and the failure: the power of empathy, camouflage as a survival strategy, etc.
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Mar 25, 2017 15:26
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:It felt like the scriptwriters forgot his character was in the movie, especially since he just steps in and takes a weapon from someone else. "Hey we established that this is your specialty weapon but watch me go!" You have it backwards. Reilly was not well-trained with the sword; he simply respected the cultural significance of it. Hiddleston, on the other hand, was actually very skilled with bladed weapons (as established early-on, in the barfight scene). The point of passing the sword, like Larson using Hiddleston's lighter, is that they work as a team. The complaints that the two characters don't do anything are misguided, because Larson spends the whole film carefully observing events - which eventually leads to her decision to give up pacifism. Larson, on the other hand, gives Hiddleston a cause he considers worth fighting for. That the film ends with the production of a couple, and they now work to dupe the population, is the Snyderesque joke. "I really do like movies that ride that fine line, the razor’s edge between parody and supporting the fake movie part of the movie."
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Apr 12, 2017 18:45
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