Kong: Skull Island questions (possible minor spoilers)

By Iain Aschendale · Mar 26, 2017 · 872 · 4
  1. Some spoilers will follow, but I'll try to keep them minor and not hitting any key plot points.

    A Broomhandle? Really?
    Computers? Maybe.
    Wait, what's that captain's rank?
    Wrong boots.
    Well, the Army changes uniforms faster and more frequently than a Japanese bride changes her dresses, but that hat don't look right to me.
    A pay phone?
    How did four Hueys and a Chinook just change into twelve Hueys, a Chinook, and a Sea Stallion?
    Does the Army even have Sea Stallions?
    They set up quick.
    Computer graphics? No.
    Ooh, he's big this time.
    You know what tactical advantage aircraft give you over ground-based forces? Altitude.
    Yeah, I suppose I'd probably panic and try to take down something the size of an insurance company office building with a 5.56 too, but it does get old. Really, I'm cool with the physics of giant monster movies, but I wonder if there's a vet in the house who could tell me how many rounds from an M-16 it would take to kill, say, a blue whale?
    Wow, they were close to the base camp.
    Is that a longslide? Wait, first, where is your goddamn barrel bushing? WTF, over?
    I like that captain. Don't like the fact that his guys address him by his last name, but he's got his head on straight.
    Whoops, no he doesn't. "Y'know why I carry this? So that when I run out of ammo, I can use it as a club without having to test the 'Mattel' legend."
    -later "Y'know why I carry this M-79 and a whole bandolier of grenades? Neither do I, apparently."
    Strangely bent dog tag.
    I've probably listened to more static than most of you have, but I've never heard static that sounded like that. Maybe it's from the storm, but the static makes the same sound as the bug, just in a different register. Lazy.
    Nope, no serrations then, sorry.
    P-51? In the Pacific? Wikipedia says it's just barely possible, but not bloody plausible.
    Hey, do you think if you got all the natives to hold hands, and then had one of them lick a 9-volt battery, they could run Windows 3.1?
    I like that door mechanism at the base of the wall. Seriously, that's pretty cool. Heavy, but cool.
    "Set up the fifty?" What frackin' fifty? This is the first time, IIRC, the fifty has ever been mentioned or shown. You do know that a fifty is about a three man item, as far as carry, don't you? Without ammo. And that you don't "set it up" without a whole bunch of fitting together, setting headspace and timing, all that jazz, by which point the baddies will have you well and truly overrun.
    Those critters' heads look familiar, but I can't think of where from. Pen and ink, I think.
    Flamethrower? Wait, I did see that earlier. But really, is Air Cav going to carry a flamethrower on a civilian survey mission? "Motherfucker*" sure seems to have a lot of ordnance for someone who thinks he's just keeping a bunch of scientists from getting eaten by inexplicable polar bears and smoke monsters.
    That same strange bend in the dog tag comes up again, on a different tag. Interesting.
    That's one hell of a flash.
    "Mother-"
    Count to five. Lather, rinse, repeat, count again. Line drive on the first-base line, he's outta there!
    Okay, we'll file her under "giant monster physics". Not one of the aspects of those (un)natural laws I've ever been terribly happy with though.
    More helicopters?
    I wish Kong were more apelike. As above, file under "giant monster physics", so he needn't be a copy of a silverback, but quadrupedal locomotion as the default would have looked better, IMHO.
    Maybe I'm getting old, but that kid doesn't look 28.

    Okay, despite all the above glitches, I did basically enjoy this movie, I just wish that they could have found a couple hundred bucks out of the $185,000,000 to hire a military consultant for an afternoon or so of fact-checking. Another complaint is that, for me at least, I just didn't get a "1973" vibe off any of the characters. In contrast, see the "Luisa Rey" sections of "Cloud Atlas". Those characters felt 1970s, these, for the most part, did not.

    And now I see that there was a post-credits Easter Egg I didn't stick around for.

    Dammit!

    *a friend's nickname for Samuel L. Jackson. "Oh, look, Motherfucker's in that movie. I like him!"
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  1. Wreybies
    The mythology of dog tags is, I think, one of the most overworked bits of Hollywood schtick whenever there are uniformed people present. In the film Battle Los Angeles there's a scene inside a helicopter where one marine is explaining to another marine why a third marine is lacing a dog tag through his bootlaces. Why? I don't mean why do that with the dog tag; I mean, why would two trained marines be having this conversation at all?
    Wreybies, Mar 26, 2017
      Iain Aschendale likes this.
  2. Iain Aschendale
    They did the same thing in "Hamburger Hill", but it was the doc complaining that the body in question (which had been decapitated by an explosion) didn't have dog tags on it anymore. This was just a props fuckup, soldier A brought the commanding officer the dog tags of all the guys that hadn't made it, and one of them was very curved, crescent shaped. Dog tag material (as you know) wouldn't do that easily, but fair enough, Kong deaths are likely to put unusual stresses on the victims and their gear. However, later on, they find (no big spoilers) the dog tags of another character, and they have the exact same crescent curve to them. Nope. This isn't like having two characters die from headshots or something, this is a plausible but very odd occurrence happening twice. Like I mentioned about the barrel bushing, the props department just phoned the movie in.
    Iain Aschendale, Mar 26, 2017
  3. Xoic
    It's hard for people who weren't around in the 70's to act or look like 70's peeps. Dazed and Confused did a good job, but Detroit Rock City looked and felt like a bunch of 90's people not even trying to be 70's. People were more laid back and relaxed or something, not as self-aware and edgy.

    Oh, and when 90's people try to do 60's or 70's dances, they never even come close.
    Xoic, May 11, 2021
      Iain Aschendale likes this.
  4. Iain Aschendale
    Well, I was around in the seventies. From 1971, to be exact, but I don't remember a lot of it in detail. I just think that the Luisa Rey sequences managed to capture the feel of 70s as portrayed in TV and movies.
    Iain Aschendale, May 11, 2021
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