Warner Bros. is developing a monster movie universe of sorts, launching with Gareth Edwards‘ 2014 “Godzilla.” That film wasn’t quite beloved, and faced more than a few criticisms that audiences saw very little of the actual monster. But for the upcoming “Kong: Skull Island,” director Jordan Vogt-Roberts specifically names Edwards’ “Godzilla” as an example of what he’s not going to do with the King Kong mythos.
“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, [namely] the notion that a monster movie needs to wait an hour or 40 minutes until the creature shows up,” the director told EW. “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.”
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So no shots are fired directly at Edwards, but certainly Vogt-Roberts wants the monster in his movie not to be a mystery, but an actual presence. The director also reveals his creature will nod more to the incarnation from the original 1933 “King Kong” film.
“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 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,” he said.
“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 that 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,” he continued. “There’s subtle nods. [The ’33 film] is 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 [where you can see] 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.’ ”
“Kong: Skull Island” rages into cinemas on March 10, 2017. Check out the first look at the monster below.
