‘No Man Comes Home from War’

Kong: Skull Island

Kong was one of the most enjoyable and least Politically Correct movies in recent years. The plot is right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, combining elements The Land that Time Forgot and Pellucidar [his hollow earth] with H.P. Lovecraft’s To the Mountains of Madness.

An uncharted island in the middle of a perpetual electromagnetic storm system is home to ancient, massive lifeforms.

Two fighter pilots are downed here in 1944, A Japanese and an American, obviously taken from the movie Hell in the Pacific.

The scene then shifts to the eve of the fall of Saigon and a paranormal researcher played by John Goodman seeks the secrets of the Island.

For security, a troop of U. S. Army Air Cavalry are charged with helio-insertion and then they run into a Japanese style King Kong, a beast so big that the Empire State Building would have never supported his weight. The best part of the movie for Ishmael and I was watching the U.S. Army helicopter troop get annihilated by a massive, manlike creature. If Kong downing the bi-plane in the original movie was your favorite moment, then you get ten minutes of that in Kong!

Our glee at the slaughter of a human-piloted machine army was so brutally adolescent that it caused some soul searching, with us agreeing that what we were cheering for was masculine defiance in the person of Kong against the machine forces of modernity. Certainly, the few remaining American men will be hunted like coyotes by Home Land Security, the FBI, ATF and DOD before the century is out.

Goodman plays a convincing role.

Samuel L. Jackson, as a hard ass Colonel gives one hope as he dives into the bad guy role rather than the martyr and sage rolls usually written for A-list black actors.

The best role was John C. Riley as the marooned aviator from WWII.

The supporting cast was good and the female eye-candy of a quality targeting a Japanese audience, with some Jap super-babe incongruently wielding an assault rifle.

The leading man and leading lady stayed with the convention established by the first movie.

Kong: Skull Island, bringing together a round dozen of movies and pulp authors into one brutal adventure, is, on one hand, a sign of these unoriginal times and on the other hand an indication that mankind still identifies more with a hairy brute than with the sissy, soul-stealing matrix that feeds upon us.

(c) 2017 James LaFond