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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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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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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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Raku posted:Seriously in the first Mothra movie you see them doing some poo poo with blood (briefly) while they worship her and in like every movie she threatens to destroy Japan. Once because they finally find a weapon that can defend them from Godzilla! It's just berry juice, it makes them invulnerable to radiation. Mothra only attacks nations keeping slaves.
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Mar 14, 2017 14:53
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IMB posted:I had a good time at this movie, came away thinking "hey that worked," got home and realized not one thing from it really stood out. I guess what I did like was the really vibrant use of colors, but other than that it was just "good." Here's one thing that stood out: Kong eating a squid in homage to the scene in Oldboy.
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Mar 15, 2017 03:58
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It's really not an exaggeration to say that Kong is depicted as basically not a God-like figure, but as a god. Yes, he gets very wounded, he feels pain, but he also shows remarkable instrumentality, which means that this Kong (far from the naive giant toying with the ladies garments) is unconquerable and omnipotent. Lightning powers in the sequel are totally not out of the question, nor are mind-control themes. The point is that Monarch is already setting up a plan to use Kong to fight Godzilla, but 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.
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Mar 15, 2017 18:46
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Mantis42 posted:The tragedy of the original Kong v Godzilla story is the fact that the protagonists tried to destroy each other instead of teaming up to take down their mutual oppressor: humanity. Hopefully the reboot has a happier ending. It's even more tragic than that: Kong immediately backed down from fighting Godzilla the first time after realizing the dude had nuclear fire breath, and then just kind of stomped around cranky 'cause he wanted to go back home. So, effectively, Kong is kidnapped twice, and each time humanity does the thing which is in his worst interests. That's exactly the sort of career move Monarch would make: Hey, what if we could control the monsters' minds/Drug them and "let them fight"?
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Mar 15, 2017 19:19
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SleepCousinDeath posted:didn't Kong go and hide behind a rock after getting hit with the atomic breath? and then jumped Godzilla from behind because Godzilla has a tiny brain. That's in the fight at the end after the 'good humans' drug him and fly him back to fight Godzilla. The first time they encounter each other, Godzilla uses his atomic breath, and Kong is like, "Well, gently caress that poo poo," and walks the other way.
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Mar 15, 2017 20:33
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Simplex posted:I kind of have to disagree with you about the morally questionable bit at least. King Kong and Heart of Darkness are both pretty racist stories, and this Kong derives pretty heavily from both. They attempted to temper this with a bunch of noble savage elements, but that really is just the opposite side of the same coin. The thing is the Skull Islanders are never depicted as "noble," in the sense that "noble savage" actually refers more specifically to a trope of European colonial culture which framed the valiant struggles of indigenous characters who were simultaneously heavily coded as "ancestors" of the colonial culture itself. The whole point of something like The Last of the Mohicans is that this mythic nobility can only be understood as consigned to a predetermined death. But the joke of Skull Island is that - without having to kill a single person - not a single of the natives has died, despite their unsentimental passivity. In fact, Reilly refers directly to the notion that the Islanders are 'ageless,' invoking the fountain of youth. In light of this, the Islanders are actually depicted, just like the cookie-cutter colonial protagonists, without sentiment. All we know is that at some point Gunpei dies, and when we meet Reilly again he's been 'replaced' by a whole tribe of indigenous Southeast Asians. This is ghost story imagery, presented in the context of a cataclysmic farce: Skull Island is like Brigadoon, where all of these tourist characters walk in expecting a 'natural' struggle and discover instead an entire tribe of people who are explicitly not struggling at all, self-disciplined to 'de-attach' themselves.
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Mar 16, 2017 04:12
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With any luck there'll be just as much continuity between the Legendary daikaiju movies as the Toho ones.
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Mar 17, 2017 14:50
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The water buffalo were adorable.
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Mar 17, 2017 23:56
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All of the acting in Skull Island is actually really good considering how 'intentionally bad' the dialog is.
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Mar 19, 2017 23:00
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Hollismason posted:I thought setting it in the 1970s was a rather inspired idea because you get all this great music and a instant understanding of the characters. That, too. Like I said before it even came out, spiritually, it's referring a lot more to the de Laurentis Kong than the C. Cooper Kong. HannibalBarca posted:Max Borenstein wrote it, so I'm not sure just how intentional the badness is. He's only got one other released feature writing-credit to his name, and while all of the pictures he's worked on have doubtlessly had multiple credited and uncredited writers, there's nothing in Godzilla that suggests that the sheer level of "this is a movie" dialog in Skull Island wasn't deliberate. The fact of the matter is that normal chaps like you and I really don't have any clarity over who wrote what or why, so all we can go by is the final result. Which is to say, there is nothing 'accidental' about the final result. Shea Whigham and Jason Mitchell, on paper, should absolutely not work as an duo, but they do, because each actor knows exactly what the dialog is 'supposed to be.' It's classic B-movie, car-dealer acting.
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Mar 20, 2017 00:02
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VolticSurge posted:Then it turns out both their mothers are named Martha,which causes them to suddenly become friends. Missed a really good "Mothra" joke, there, guy.
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Apr 6, 2017 13:37
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Simplex posted:It's a different take that it's a man playing a role that traditionally would be a female character, but I think it trends towards being a pretty useless character regardless of the gender roles. You should check out Queen Kong and King Kong Lives.
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Apr 12, 2017 21:29
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:33 |
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G*A*P*E
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Apr 13, 2017 00:24
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