MemeMachineGo!

The Skull Island natives: what the heck kind of life did they live? Their part of the island seemed quite barren. I can understand the wall being built to keep the highly dangerous creatures of the interior at bay. But then, why offer brides to the giant apes? Why interact with them at all? One wonders what the natives got in exchange for their sacrifices. Maybe Kong and his kin protected the humans from the islands’ other predators in a sort of “we primates gotta stick together” solidarity. But then, why offer one of their own as sacrifice? What did the apes get out of it?

And for that matter, where did they all go after the initial battle? When the steamer’s crew was laying their trap for Kong, the natives all seemed to have buggered off. Where to, and why? They may have been afraid of the guns, but there were a lot of natives, and the area around the gate was their home turf. Logically, the white men would never have been able to do something so involved as laying their trap for the ape without being slaughtered. But then, of course, there’d have been no movie.

The brontosaurus stampede, as it was portrayed, had just too much dino-flesh gallumphing around in too small a space for the film crew to have survived as long as they did. And look at how many dinosaurs died during the chase: they were being chomped by velociraptors, trampled by their herd-mates, and falling off of cliffs. Big lizards just don’t reproduce that fast, and if something like that stampede happened on a regular basis, the entire herd would have been dead long before Carl Denham and crew got there. On a continent the size of North America I could see herds and stampedes like that, but not on a little island.

When Jack Driscoll goes back to the interior of the island to find Ann: by the film’s own account, “seventeen crew members suffered horrible deaths” in the space of an afternoon in that jungle. We’ve been shown that it’s a highly dangerous environment. And Jack goes in without a gun, without a compass, without even a freakin’ canteen. And he locates Ann within what must be a couple of hours or less, apparently having encountered no danger whatsoever along the way. The bounce went out of my suspension-of-disbelief bungee on that one.

Then we get to New York, and Kong goes a-romping in Times Square. Very well done, Jackson doesn’t flinch from showing that this ape is very dangerous and people are getting killed left and right. I don’t think he could have so easily played around with an eighty-ton trolley car, but we’ll let that one go, there are worse offenses in this sequence.

F’rinstance, when Kong chases Jack out of Times Square and through the alleys, they go from the bright lights and crowds of Broadway to a totally quiet side street. No cars, no pedestrians, not even the sound of a siren. Now, I’ve been in Manhattan at night and I know that you can occasionally find blocks that eerily deserted and quiet. But not within sprinting distance of Times Square during prime theater hours.

And the Central Park ice pond scene. Okay, I can actually believe that the ice could have been strong enough that a giant ape could slide around and not crack it. A few straight days of sub-freezing temperatures will produce some pretty thick ice. But then here comes Ann, wearing a sleveless chorus-girl outfit and no coat. She should be in pain from the cold after about a minute. But we don’t see any signs that she’s feeling the cold, not even a “brr”. And let’s not even talk about her running through icy New York streets in whatever shoes she was wearing.

But the worst oversight of the Central Park scene had nothing to do with the cold. Simply put, where was everybody? Christmas displays in Manhattan get a lot of people checking them out, even on cold nights. Maybe the ape scared them all off and the police and army kept any more people from getting in, but there would have been quite a crowd for Kong to get through on his way to the pond, and we don’t see any sign of their existence.

So then Kong climbs the Empire State Building. The ape’s actions are quite understandable, and fit perfectly with his behavior as established in previous scenes. What makes no sense are the actions of the humans pursuing him.

Think about it. The ape is on top of the tallest building in the city. What’s up there? No food, no water, barely enough room to stand. He can’t harm anyone there, because there is no one up there. (Except the crazy broad who ne brought with him, but we’ll get back to her in a minute.) Sooner or later he’s going to get tired, hungry, or just plain demoralized. There’s nowhere for him to go but down.

So why send airplanes to shoot him?

Because that’s what happened in the original movie, of course. Not that it made any sense in that version either.

Now, Ann is up there with Kong. She’s got to be terrified and more than a little shell-shocked. She’s been dragged around the city in subfreezing weather, and is now on top of the Empire State Building (and if you’ve ever been up there, you know that it’s usually even colder and windier than the streets below). She should be dead already, and being up there with half a dozen planes attacking an angry ape, she can’t be expected to live much longer unless someone does something intelligent.

Kong shows both compassion and great presence of mind by placing her inside the building where she’ll be safe. And what does Ann do? Climbs right back onto the cold, windy spire of the building, complete with enraged creature and planes firing heavy-caliber machine gun bullets. One can only conclude that at this point, Ann has gone completely out of her mind, and has lost all will to live. (But she’s all better when Jack comes to collect her after the battle.)

And then Kong falls, splat, onto Fifth Avenue. Except there’s no splat. I’m not an expert in such things, but I don’t really think that a multi-ton body falling from almost a thousand feet up would wind up so well-preserved at the terminus of the fall. A lot of cracked pavement smeared with bloody flesh is what I’d be expecting.

So now we come to the end of the film, and I’ve got just one more nit to pick. Kong is a large male gorilla, who spends much of the movie in an excited state. So how come we never once see (forgive me) Kong’s dong?