Thuktun Flishithy wrote:Holy fuck yes, I'm glad other people share my opinion about Jackson's depiction of the Skull Islanders. FFS, he somehow managed to make it even worse than the original 1933 movie- at least in that one they're shown with a degree of sympathy when Kong razes their village, whereas in the 2005 movie they're depicted as inhuman brutes, more like Jackson's depiction of Orcs than any real culture. The bit where they focus on the kid grinning like a sociopath while Ann's being offered to Kong comes to mind. Hell, I could've sworn some supplementary materials claimed that the people living on the island had become a separate species from humanity, which only makes it even worse.
Yeah the kid gets to me to as well as the way they offer Ann up like the framing is just so terrible and the irony is could forgive the 1933 version because of the different film period and for the points you mentioned but I can't forgive Peter for this error because he knew better there were years of people speaking out against blackface and these kinds of racist depictions even in 2005 Hollywood yet he still went ahead and filmed it.
This is why Skull Island in my view is the best version because it fixes this issue on so many levels and I'm really hopeful this will now follow through into Godzilla vs Kong as it original 1963 version is problematic as well but it's more along the lines of the natives being a funny joke than Peter's inhuman animal version. Hopefully, it will be done in the same way as Skull Island and it will finally put this issue to bed and mean no one will be dumb enough to repeat it ever again in the US franchise or any reboots decades from now if it's revisited.