Entertainment Weekly has pulled back the curtain on Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island today by giving us our first proper look at the titular monster. Though we’d caught glimpses of Kong in previous trailers for the film, this is by far the most revealing look yet, and we have to say, he’s pretty terrifying.
The 100 ft. tall beast will no doubt be the star of Warner Bros.’ tentpole when it bashes its way into theatres next year, and though we’ll wait to see him in action before deciding how he stacks up against previous versions of the monster, we’re certainly impressed with this first look.
Speaking about the photo that was revealed today, Vogt-Roberts told EW the following:
“That sequence comes from a point in the movie where you’re not quite sure who Kong is, what his purpose is, how people should be perceiving him,” the director said. “Through the folly of man, where our initial instinct is to attack anything that is not a known quantity, both sides jump the gun, Kong and the humans, and it kicks off a relatively messy engagement. At first, of course you’re going to perceive something like that as a terrible threat and monster — the physicality of him alone.”
“A huge part of the movie was designing him and creating the creature so that when you did see him it sort of short circuited your brain and was divisive to people, where certain people immediately say ‘That’s a threat,’ certain people immediately say, ‘That’s a God,’ certain people immediately say, ‘That’s a savior.’ Visually and instantly, what happens when you see this thing towering over you and what is your sort of emotional and intellectual response?”
The director also talked about how he’s hoping to have Kong: Skull Island differ from Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla in that he won’t be taking a slow burn approach, which is something that will definitely please most people:
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.”
Kong: Skull Island will star Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton), Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell and Eugene Cordero. It’ll stomp into theatres on March 10th, 2017.
