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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > KONG

Jenny Angel: Oct 24, 2010; Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!; Lipstick Apathy

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

# ¿ Mar 13, 2017 03:33

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:41

Jenny Angel: Oct 24, 2010; Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!; Lipstick Apathy

JonathonSpectre posted:

So I saw this yesterday.

You know how when you watched the Lord of the Rings movies you could just tell that everyone who worked on the project cared deeply about making it good?

This is a movie that NO ONE involved in cared about at all. It wasn't "bad," in that yes, there is a plot, and yes, there are actors, and yes, this is a film that tells a coherent (if very stupid) story. It's worse than bad. It's lifeless. The only reason it exists is, "We need a King Kong movie to set up some other movies." Outside of J.Reilly it seemed like everyone else in the movie spent every scene mainly thinking about how quickly they were going to get off set and spend their check.

To roughly paraphrase the greatest, I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated hated hated it. It should have been called KONG: SKULL ISLAND CONSUMER PRODUCT AND TOY VEHICLE. Its body should have been burned in a trash bin. I'd rather watch two hours of a movie that was straight-up bad due to poor filmmaking, acting, etc. than thirty seconds of this unloved paint-by-numbers slog. I was checking my watch 20 minutes in.

If you haven't seen it yet and are browsing the thread deciding whether or not to see it, don't! Do anything else with your $10. Go buy $10 worth of birdseed and go dump it in a field and watch the birds eat. Donate it to an animal shelter. Have a nice lunch at that new Cuban place. Go buy $10 worth of eggs and just throw them away. Do anything at all with your money besides seeing this.

My only hope for this, uh, film, is that its incredibly egregious, endlessly-repeating use of "iconic" '70s songs over images of Hueys and dudes in olive drab looking bored in those Hueys causes massive public outrage and we can stop seeing this exact same montage in every movie even tangentially related to Vietnam. It happens literally like 4-5 times in this Kong product, to the point that even my 12 year-old nephew was like, "Do you think that they'll play Bohemian Rhapsody later while they are flying away?"

Has talking like this ever worked out for you

# ¿ Mar 19, 2017 20:16

Jenny Angel: Oct 24, 2010; Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!; Lipstick Apathy

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

I like Ford as well. He's a well meaning schmuck.

How much does it own that the casually racist Bryan Cranston character named his kid Ford while living as an American expat in Japan in the 90's

# ¿ Mar 23, 2017 02:09

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