The brand new trailer for Legendary’s Kong: Skull Island is here. And much to our surprise, it carries a very different tone than what we saw at Comic-Con earlier this summer. Check it out below…
This new trailer balances the film’s intense action with John C. Reilly, who was curiously absent from the first trailer (aside from a line of voiceover). His bearded character appears to be the movie’s comic relief — a goofball who’s been living on Skull Island amongst the natives for years. He also seems to be military, so maybe he’s been stranded on Skull Island since the Korean War. If Kong gets as grim as that first trailer, Reilly’s trademark levity is really going to help keep things from getting unbearably heavy.
But overall, Kong: Skull Island looks to be making a real effort to feel different. Peter Jackson’s King Kong is still fresh in many minds — fresh enough that Universal’s new Kong ride uses its creatures and designs. The Skull Island section of Jackson’s movie is almost a feature of its own: an overblown but enjoyable monster movie. Jackson reveled in those aspects of the original film.
Jordan Vogt-Roberts, director of Kong: Skull Island appears to be celebrating those aspects in a very different way. We don’t see a single dinosaur in this new trailer, and I expect that’ll be true of the final film. But it won’t need dinosaurs if the creatures are as cool as that giant water buffalo. Kong himself is very simple, an elemental interpretation that makes him bigger and badder than ever before.
What remains to be seen is how Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston, the film’s leading duo, fit into all this. Their characters have taken a backseat to the spectacle in the movie’s marketing. Therefore I’m wondering just what roles they play. I don’t expect Brie Larson’s character to end up as the sacrificial damsel — we’ve already seen Fay Wray, Jessica Lange, and Naomi Watts do that. I suspect that Larson’s character, a war photographer, will have a different purpose in this version of Kong.
Whatever the case may be, we’ll find out when Kong: Skull Island throws a palm tree into cinemas next March.