Here's Your First Look At The Titular Monster In KONG: SKULL ISLAND
The first official image of Kong: Skull Island's titular beast has been revealed, and he looks...well, a lot like King Kong! Meanwhile, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts weighs in on how he'll be introduced.
Kong: Skull Island looks set to be one of 2017's most exciting releases, especially now we know that a movie pitting King Kong against Godzilla is in the works. A glimpse of the iconic monster has already been revealed in the teaser trailer, but Entertainment Weekly has today unveiled a first look at him.
"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," Jordan Vogt-Roberts explains. "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." Interestingly, the filmmaker then went on to take a shot at Godzilla helmer Gareth Edwards.
"Well, the reveal you can wait for in the film itself, but you’ll see, I shot this on anamorphic lenses, which a lot of people said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re taking away more space to show how big he is!’…It seemed like a bigger challenge to communicate scale in that way. 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."
To be fair, many fans and critics took issue with Edwards' slow burn approach to introducing Godzilla, so it is a relief that Kong: Skull Island won't be taking the same approach. Thoughts on this first look?