Home Entertainment First official look at KONG: SKULL ISLAND; character, timeline details revealed

First official look at KONG: SKULL ISLAND; character, timeline details revealed

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Look, let it never be said that the folks over at Legendary Pictures aren’t a literal bunch. When you have a movie coming out call Kong: Skull Island, and you’re about to reveal the very first official image from the production, I guess you could do worse than an actual skull on an island. Especially since said is big… very, very big.

The pic comes courtesy of EW, and shows off the stars of the upcoming new King Kong flick, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, in some kind of massive boneyard. And we mean massive, as director Jordan Vogt-Roberts confirmed recent reports about the size of the titular ape in this reboot of the classic monster franchise.

From the size of the skull, you can tell that things on this island are much bigger than audiences are used to with traditional Kong lore. Our Kong is by far the biggest Kong that you’ve seen on screen, and that translates to a lot of different things on the island.

In terms of actual size, our Kong is by far the biggest Kong. Peter Jackson’s Kong was around 25 feet. The ‘33 Kong ranged between 25 feet and 50 feet, I want to say he was 50-plus feet when he was on the Empire State Building. He varied in size dramatically! The ’70s Kong was somewhere between them.

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And there’s of course a reason for Legendary super-sizing this latest version of Kong, as this film is set to tie into the cinematic universe established in Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla reboot, with the two titanic beasts eventually set to face off in Godzilla vs King Kong in a few years time. And with Kong’s new towering stature, it can actually be a fair fight this time. What’s more, it’s allowing the filmmakers to tell this already very well-known story with a new spin on it.

We’re very explicitly not telling the beauty and the beast story. The original is a classic, the ’70s version is great for what it is, and Peter’s version is a great retelling of the 1933 film.

And a huge part of that new take is actually due to the film’s time period of the 1970’s, and Vogt-Roberts explained that they chose that era for a very particular reason.

The ’70s was a time where it was believable that we could still be confronted with myth. And there was still unknown in the world.

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That “unknown” era ended when NASA launched a satellite program named LANDSAT which started mapping out the Earth from space. In the movie, it’s LANDSAT that finds this mysterious island, and which prompts a team to investigate it. The director elaborated on this team, which includes Hiddleston’s ex-SAS tracker, Larson’s war photographer “who’s seen all sorts of terrible, terrible things.” But even so nothing can prepare her for the gigantic discoveries she makes on that island.

The thing that most interested me was, how big do you need to make [Kong], so that when someone lands on this island and doesn’t believe in the idea of myth, the idea of wonder – when we live in a world of social and civil unrest, and everything is crumbling around us, and technology and facts are taking over – how big does this creature need to be, so that when you stand on the ground and you look up at it, the only thing that can go through your mind is: ‘That’s a god.’” Pretty big, we’re guessing? “You will see when we drop a trailer.

Unfortunately, there’s now official word yet on when said trailer will be dropping, but with the film expected to have huge presence [pun intended] at this weekend coming’s San Diego Comic-Con, you might want to keep your eyes peeled then.

Kong: Skull Island also stars Samuel L Jackson, John Goodman and John C Reilly, and is scheduled for release on March 10, 2017.

Last Updated: July 19, 2016

One Comment

  1. it’s not the size of the Kong but how you use it?

    Reply

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