'Kong: Skull Island' Trailer Teaser Footage Takes A Very Different Approach Than 'Godzilla'

The 2014 American Godzilla stretched the Jaws maxim — keep your monster hidden — almost to the breaking point. The camera had a lot of trouble finding Godzilla, despite its titanic size. Whatever. It worked. Godzilla was good enough to cement the return of giant monster movies as a blockbuster genre. And next year another giant monster returns, with Kong: Skull Island once again rebooting the giant ape, King Kong, after Peter Jackson’s half-successful 2005 attempt. From what we’ve seen, the new film’s approach to the giant ape will be very different, departing from both Godzilla’s obscuration and King Kong ’s sympathy. New trailer teasers offer bits of footage that dramatize the dramatic new take.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer) is doing a couple things differently here.

First, King Kong is definitely more monster than buddy. He looks untamed and ferocious, with a new design that bears little similarity to the giant gorilla design of Jackson’s King Kong . According to Vogt-Roberts, he wanted Kong to be his own species while recapturing the look of the 1933 original:

“With Kong, there’s been obviously so many different versions of him in the past and ours needed to feel unique to our film. I had a mandate that I wanted a kid to be able to doodle him on the back of a piece of homework and for his shapes to be simple and hopefully iconic enough that, like, a third grader could draw that shape and you would know what it is… We sort of went back to the 1933 version in the sense that he’s a bipedal creature that walks in an upright position, as opposed to the anthropomorphic, anatomically correct silverback gorilla that walks on all fours. Our Kong was intended to say, like, this isn’t just a big gorilla or a big monkey. This is something that is its own species.”

The new King Kong is also huge. The second biggest King Kong ever, after King Kong vs. Godzilla.

But what these trailer teasers indicate most emphatically is that King Kong will not be camera-shy in Kong: Skull Island. Kong will be right out in the broad daylight, swatting at helicopters, when Kong: Skull Island hits theaters on March 10, 2017.