King Kong

Warning: This blog contains spoilers. Continue reading at the risk of being less surprised at the theater.

There is a good reason why pedantic biologists never make monster movies, we'd suck all the fun right out it. The special effects team for King Kong definately had their work cut out for them. But they rose to the task and I'd be surprised if they don't win the academy award for it. The textures of the creatures were great. Skin moved like skin, hair moved like hair, and things exploded pretty much how you'd expect them to. The problem however, is that although the special effects guys had some awesome physics engines to produce realistic textures and movements, they obviously had to through out any consideration of size.
Size is a serious constraint on movement and how an animal must be designed. For example, after the band of heros has been chased by every dinosaur on Skull Island, they are dropped down a ravine where they are attacked by giant bugs. Not just made up bugs, but enormous crickets, worms, tailless whip scorpions, cave spiders and other arthropods that I didn't imediately recognize. Except for enlarged jaws and claws, the proportions of each of these bugs was true to the original creature. However, if you scale up a bug, it would be too heavy to support its own weight. The largest land arthropod ever was a millipede that was about a foot wide and five or six feet long. It got around by having dozens of legs to hold itself up. The reason that one to one (or isometric) scaling up doesn't work is that a body's weight increases proportionately to the volume (a cubic function) and the muscle streangth increases proportionally to the cross sectional area of the muslce. Therefore, for a doubling of all dimensions, the weight increases 8 times, while the streangth only 4. The giant bugs would have likely even crushed themselves under their own weight, much less be able to climb down walls and leap onto the face of Adrien Brody.
With this in mind, Kong would have been much different too. He would have much less resembled a gorilla than the primate equivalent of a large ungulate. He most certainly would not have been able to jump around or slip around on a frozen pond. Remember, the weight of an animal is distributed over the area of its feet (and in this case knuckles). Therefore, Kong would have either had to have much much larger feet, or something more columnar and elephantine.
The other problem that size imposes on the creatures of Skull island is that large animals typically don't persist on small islands. Normally one sees pygmies rather than giants. It would have been a much different movie if Ann Darrow was abducted by a troupe of pygmie gorillas. Islands can't support large creatures. They quickly run out of food. I suppose that this might explain why everything was so eager to eat the humans. I really don't see spiders living peacefully with crickets, waiting for something to fall into their den.
Now for the dinosaur review: Peter Jackson obviously went for artsy rather than accurate. Ever dinosaur was an homage to some monster movie of the 1930's. There is even a point where Ann Darrow is menased by nothing less than a giant rock iguana. That's right, the special effects guys made a computer version of one of the worst dinosaurs in movie history; an iguana with extra spikes glued to its back. There is a rather important scene where the men are all chased by a herd of sauropods through a steep walled canyon. Those that aren't crushed right away or when every dinosaur trips over one another at the end escape by running between the legs of the giants. Two problems here. First, a large sauropod could probably do a top speed of 10 miles an hour running. Second, if they did go as fast as they did on film, then every other thing in the gorge would have been crushed; the people, the stupid looking bug eyed raptor wanna-be's, everything. Nobody survives a buffalo stampede or an elephant stampede, sauropods should be no different. Here's the artsy thing though. These weren't just any sauropods, these were undouptably Brontosaurus'. If my dad reads this, he'll no doubt point out that he's been advocating the validity of Brontosaurus as a name since I first took an interest in dinosaurs and found out that it was't valid. Since Peter Jackson wanted this to be set at the same time as the original King Kong, he used the dinosaurs that they did. I can't even feel justified in calling them Camerasaurs, the body would be wrong. Simply, it's an Apatosaur body with a Camerasaur head. Therefore, it's a Brontosaurus.
As for T. rex, it was well done, though I seriously wasn't expecting three of them. I was concerned that they'd messed too much witht the teeth of the dinosaur since the one on the posters is quite snaggle toothed, but the two others had normal teeth. The crocodilian style skin does bother me (since they didn't have dermal armor like a croc) but this was homage to the claymation dinosaurs of the first film. What bothered me more though was that Kong was bitten several times without showing major damage. T. rex had the strongest bite of any animal ever known. Stronger than a great white, stronger than any of the other contendors for largest predator ever. It would essentially be equivalent to getting hit by a Buick with teeth the size of bananas. But Kong can't lose until the end, so he bests the tyrant lizards by tearing open those powerful jaws. If you were to ask me to bet on a gorilla vs. a hyena, I'd bet on the hyena. The gorilla's got reach and strength of arm, but the hyena, like T. rex has bone crushing jaws. One gorilla vs. 3 hyenas, and I'd still bet on the bone crushers.
Oh yeah, and Kong dies at the end but doesn't spat so much as land intact. He doesn't even crack pavement. I realize that a penny would reach critical velocity before hitting the street, but not a 25 foot gorilla.