Even as the corporate media brags about how our ‘civilization’ can now visualize planets in other solar systems, the real news is at home on our Dying Planet. 
Even the bugs are dying off, along with the mammals, fish, plants, and everything. Insecticide! An ecological disaster that will affect us all. Nobody seems much to care as we have a society that has now embraced suicide as norm. And everybody says they are so happy!
While their older brother, sisters and cousins were “peeling” across the Caribbean Sea on a banana boat, Devon and Ryan were overjoyed to learn that they would get to visit the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve near Tulum to learn about the different ecosystems of the Yucatan peninsula. They bounded with unbridled joy from our adorable beach cabana to wait in the heat and humidity for the tour van.
Our open-air boat motored quickly through canals used by the ancient Mayans as well as various lagoons, our guide stopping periodically to point out birds or plants that might be of interest to us. One particularly engaging stop was for the banana orchid.
The banana orchid is an epiphyte, a plant that lives on another plant without damaging its host as a parasite would. The banana orchid’s pseudo-bulbs (the banana-y looking things) play host to nests of stinging ants. The ants feed on the nectar of the orchid and protect the plant from other insects and pollinate it in return. An endless parade of ants marched up and down the stem of the orchid, ignoring us as we all smelled the slight scent of banana surrounding the blooms.
Amazingly, a nearly identical species of banana orchid is endemic to the Cayman Islands. Still an epiphyte, but living on different trees and aided in pollination by the tree itself. Nary an ant in sight.
To me this is an astounding example of adaptation and the bounty of the natural world. I guess every living thing strives to survive, no matter the circumstance, and hopes for a little cooperation from its fellow beings. There is no right way. No singular path. We can hammer out a workable existence using the resources that surround us.
Okay, I admit that’s my own headline. There was indeed no trace of a King dong, but neither was there lust, nor anything more than a communication barrier overcome by physical clowning. A young white lass with Vaudeville chops was able to cajole the mighty Kong where scores of unfortunate black maidens had failed.
But really the special effects in the latest King Kong were amazing.
With special effects the filmmakers were able to create a giant gorilla who went ape at the sound of tom-toms summoning him to dine on a mouse-sized snack.
Special effects recreated superstitious black peoples who subsisted on the craggy coast of Skull Island, separating themselves from the island’s vegetation to live behind great fortifications and beneath countless pointy sticks on which were impaled human sacrificees.
Special effects produced dinosaurs also very keen to fight over what would be a tiny human morsel, willing to discard bigger kill for the smaller bird in the bush, even gnash away at a rocky surface trying to snatch said bony morsel.
To another extreme, special effects created bats which prey on animals larger than insects, and they stalk their target, hanging upside down each time a bit closer.
Convenient for the slow shutter rate of film projectors, these bats fly with the awkwardness of pterodactyls, the beating of their wings visible to human eyes. Lucky for our heroes who escape by holding on to the wing of a bat, while he flies with the other. A feat clearly accomplished only through special effects.
Special effects depict a world plainly ignorant of what some know as the food chain. The filmmakers can adhere to the laws of gravity, sort of, and whichever laws of physics can be illustrated, but they can’t grasp the food chain or that animals kill to eat, they do not maraud mercilessly.
By depicting nature as malevolent, we are expressing the highest disrespect for what really have become our wards. Like depicting Jesus with a machine gun for example. It might be funny, but it would be pretty undeserved.
But there’s more. Special effects produced stampedes both human and Jurassic, from which few casualties are seen. Men are able to keep pace beneath Brontosaurus legs to make the Spaniards who run with the bulls every year in Pamplona look like wusses.
And in the end you have Kong flinging blond lasses left and right, you have an entire opera house audience stampede to the exits with nary a body left behind.
In fact, given Peter Jackson’s fondness for gross-out scenes like the close-up of the carnivorous worm devouring a man head first, it seems strange that they cranked back the special effects for Kong’s final splat unto street level from the Empire State building. Kong’s body at rest on the street is shown not one bit like a sack empty of its potatoes, the usual sudden end to a 100 story fall.
David Letterman fans might have hoped to see Kong burst like a watermelon fallen from a great height, but special effects intervened.
And so the special effects try to approximate mechanical consequences, but ignore the organic, what used to be the common knowledge of life.
While this might suit the lower educated of today’s movie audience, Peter Jackson certainly does not limit himself to that denominator. In an early scene he risks boring that crowd with three interminable inside jokes: the actress they had wanted to cast for this adventure, “Fay,” was already doing an “RKO” picture for that damned “Cooper.” Rocky Horror Picture Show fans would get those references, but so what? Why not throw some bones to zoology majors and enlighten everyone.
The special effects in King Kong trade not merely in the currency of the implausible or improbable or impossible, they perpetuate the currency of ignorance with which people do great evil to nature and the environment and other cultures, particularly indigenous ones.
This film plays with lots of movie land conventions, but to an audience that is less privy to the inside references and more prone to base human reactions to the demonized stereotypes.