Exactly four months from today, the iconic creature known as King Kong will be back on the big screen, starring in director Jordan Vogt-Roberts' KONG: SKULL ISLAND. The trailer for the film only gave obscured glimpses of the great giant, but with the movie's release drawing near the time has come for the filmmakers to give the first official clear look at the centerpiece character. Vogt-Roberts shared the first image of Kong with Entertainment Weekly, and the picture can be seen below.
Vogt-Roberts tells EW that he wanted a simple look for Kong, one that drew inspiration from the original 1933 classic KING KONG. He also wanted his Kong to walk in a similar way, upright, taking the character in a different direction than Peter Jackson did with his 2005 remake, where he had Kong moving like a gorilla. Vogt-Roberts' Kong isn't just a giant gorilla, this guy is his own species, and the director describes the character as "a lonely god", a "morose figure".
Deep within Vogt-Roberts' interview with EW, he gives a quote that is the best thing I've heard about this project yet:
We’re also fundamentally not playing the same game that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla did and most monster movies do, which I’m sort of sick of the notion that a monster movie needs to wait an hour or 40 minutes until the creature shows up. Kong traditionally does not show up in these movies until very, very late, and the monster traditionally does not show up until very, very late in a monster movie, so a lot of these movies tend to have this structure that’s a bit of a slow burn. Something about this movie made me want to reject that and play a very, very different game."
As someone who was frustrated and disappointed by the way Gareth Edwards presented his GODZILLA, a GODZILLA movie with hardly any Godzilla in it, I'm all for rejecting that approach and bringing Kong into his movie earlier.
Set in the 1970s, KONG: SKULL ISLAND was written by Max Borenstein, John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Derek Connolly. The story centers on
a diverse team of explorers who are brought together to venture deep into an uncharted island in the Pacific – as beautiful as it is treacherous – unaware that they’re crossing into the domain of the mythic Kong.
The film stars Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell, and Eugene Cordero.
We'll get to see Vogt-Roberts' Kong in action when KONG: SKULL ISLAND reaches theatres on March 10, 2017. After the sequel to Gareth Edwards' GODZILLA is released in 2019, the monsters will return in GODZILLA VS. KONG in 2020.
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