First Look at Kong From KONG: SKULL ISLAND and He Looks Pissed Off
Legendary Pictures has released a new photo from Kong: Skull Island giving us our first good look at Kong, and he sure doesn't look happy. I've been curious about what Kong would look like and now that I've seen it... he looks like Kong! The biggest difference about this latest version is the fact that he is a lot bigger than any other previous Kong we've seen.
The image was posted on EW along with a lengthy interview with director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer). He discussed the film and talked about the details of coming up with this new version of the giant creature. One of the things he talked about was eyes of Kong's eyes and how they are the window to the soul and they wanted to convey that he's a tragic hero through them. Talking about his artistic vision for Kong, the director explained:
"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. A big part of our Kong was I wanted to make something that gave the impression that he was a lonely God, he was a morose figure, lumbering around this island.
"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. It has its own set of rules, so we can do what we want and we really wanted to pay homage to what came before…and yet do something completely different.
"There’s subtle nods. [The ’33 film] was black and white, so it’s really easy to assume that the fur on the monkey is black, but there’s actually a lot of forums and things that you read and there’s some real poster artwork where Kong’s fur skews more brownish, so we actually pushed his fur in more of a brown as opposed to the traditional black. It really was trying to create this feeling so that when these humans look up at him, they hopefully have a visceral response, saying to themselves, ‘That’s a God, I’m looking at a God.’"
This is just a small part of a much longer interview, and if you're excited about the film and looking to learn more about the director's vision for it, make sure to click here.
The story for the new film is set in the 1970s and follows a team of explorers who venture deep into the treacherous, primordial island to find the leader's brother and a mythical serum, confronting extraordinary creatures along the way.
The movie stars Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Goodman. It's set to be released on March 10th, 2017.