Blogs of a bunch of friends

Biota.org Interview

03 January 06 - 10:14 am

Last week I was interviewed by Tom Barbalet of Biota.org about my ALife project, Biots. You can read the interview Here.

Scarybug - No comments - Permalink

King Kong

03 January 06 - 09:18 am

Least convincing part of the movie - A pack of Allosauroids pass up a bunch of dying sauropods in order to risk life and limb chasing measly humans.

Some day I hope a monster movie will accurately portray natural carnivore behavior.

On the other hand, the idea I got from Skull island was not that it was a place with a natural ecosystem, rather, that something happened there in ancient times that required all of the animals there to evolve as big and mean and deadly as possible.

Once a few animals start killing for no reason, it often becomes necessary for all other animals to follow suit. I've seen it happen in Biots. The thing is that usually killing for no reason is a waste of precious energy, so that kind of thing only evolves in an environment with an abundance of food.

I think this must be what happened on skull island. You can see that even the native humans have developed that kind of brutality in response to the kind of horrible, horrible place that is Skull Island.

Another thing I appreciated, the dinosaurs, giant reptiles, giant bats, and giant arthropods were not just giant, but otherwise identical versions of their relatives. We shouldn't expect to see a Cretacious-Era T-Rex on a modern island. What might see is an animal that is descended from group of T-Rex, perhaps staying fairly similar in appearance, but not entirely. These T-Rex were smart, spry, social, and had an extra finger or two.

Some of the arthropods probably did disobey the cube-square law that physically limits how large an animal with an exoskeleton can get before collapsing in on itself, or having a shell so thick it can't walk, but it wasn't as bad as Starship Troopers. But hell, Kong's bones were probably not thick enough to support his size.

Gorilla-lovers might appreciate the fact that Kong only ever ate leaves. Sure he killed stuff with his teeth, but he never ate it. I wouldn't have been too taken aback by the idea that Kong was a giant ape that evolved omnivory. Chimps and Humans are both omnivorous apes. Kong is obviously a Gorilla, but again, he's got to be a new species of Gorilla, and it wouldn't have been crazy for him to eat meat. His herbivory did very little to win me over to his side actually. He killed a lot of people for essentially no reason. (Okay, he was protecting a "mate", but the natives had given him lots of women that he pulled apart for no good reason) Because of this, his killing seemed more like murder than predation. This is perfectly believable coming from an intelligent ape, it just didn't really make me like his character. We can't blame Kong for being a killer, because he was alone on the most horrible place in the world, but I don't have to like him.

I liked the movie. I loved the 1930's stuff in the beginning, the vaudeville stuff, the movie pitch stuff. I loved Jack Black, Adrien Brody, and especially Naomi Watts. I loved Skull Island TO DEATH! It was like watching a nature show about the worst place ever! However, I was kinda bored by the 3rd act.

After all the cool stuff on Skull Island, New York seemed tame. Jack Black got really hokey (I think on purpose, as Brody mentions his character is great at destroying what he loves). I didn't care about Kong be the time we got to New York. If he'd only killed in self defense, I would have liked him more. If it seemed he was running scared through the streets, wrecking stuff out of fear, more than anger, I would have like him more. In the end, I wasn't sad when Kong died.

Also, are we really supposed to believe that there were THREE separate shows with packed audiences the night Kong was on stage? What was the deal with that? I kinda liked that Ann Darrow refused to play herself in the show. It made sense for her character, but if we're trying to make sense, why put Kong on Broadway and not some actually securish area like a Zoo?

And while I'm at it I wish that at one point, any character who instantly turned into a Kickass Action Star in the movie, would have had "I was in the Army/Great War/Volunteer Firefighters/Boy Scouts" somewhere in their backstory. Brody's character was awesome, but I was kinda shocked at how good he was at tracking and rescuing Watts. Sure he's doing it "for love". But that doesn't mean he should be good at it. He's a playwrite! So I just decided he used to be in the army, even if they never say so in the movie. Problem solved.

Scarybug - three comments - Permalink