|
Raku posted:
Ha ha yeah, it's 12A over in the UK and I couldn't believe the amount of stuff they got away with. This is worth a watch on the sheer amount of monsters alone; it moves away from the dinosaurian aesthetic of the original and goes more for the insects and the occasional weird oddity (the cow thing), it's kind of like the excised spider-pit sequence writ large. I can see why they moved away from the dinosaurs as Kong's enemy, as Kong versus another Rex might be too similar to what they are planning for later entries in the monster-verse. The anti-war themes were really well, if sometimes humorously, applied. It doesn't beat you over the head with it but it's certainly there in a way it visually recalls certain war films and narratively deals with the impacts of the characters and the motivations of the soldiers, but it also doesn't let an overbearing solemnity weigh down the fun aspects, in fact it's openly and happily goofy at time in a way that felt almost gleeful. However, the most interesting characters were all the supporting players, whereas as the seemingly romantic leads were as thinly sketched as they possibly could be. Plus, I felt it suffered some times from CG magic camera, the thing that made Gareth Edwards' Godzilla so effective for me is how he kept his camera often in very human spaces (inside office windows, cockpits) which made his monsters seem more viscerally terrifying, massive and awe inspiring. Vogt-Robert's camera spins madly in the air around Kong and is unbound by any sense of physicality which, while it does make for some great fights and awesome imagery, lacked the same power. There's nothing in this film comparable to the Golden Gate sequence in Godzilla 14. But it is a lot of fun and very good, and if you like monsters, a must-see.
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2017 01:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:38 |
|
|
Both Skull Island and Godzilla 14, as well as the majority of the late sixties/seventies showa Godzilla pictures and some of Heisei and Millenium series are about submission to a higher power. Godzilla 2014 makes this explicit in the sense that the entire Military might fails in almost every thing it does (with Brody as the exception) and only upon stepping back and letting God do his work is true salvation found. Godzilla 14 is about the impotence of the military whereas Skull Island is more about the failure of the military to perform any function other than exacerbate death and destruction and ensure its own. Don't know how this is going to figure into Godzilla vs Kong. The original King Kong vs Godzilla is about how unregulated capitalism creates disaster with its greedy business antagonists (Mothra vs, Godzilla is a far better exploration of this concept though), but I'm not sure this new version can repeat that trick, 62 Kong is a capable goof and a pawn, pleasant in his fallibility, whereas as Skull Island is god-like and textually cool, so it'll be interesting how they cast the divisions between this new Kong and Godzilla. Either way they should probably do the bit with the tree again, as it's awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2017 21:23
|
|