King Kong is absolutely massive in the upcoming Kong: Skull Island. His silhouette blocks out the sun and easily towers over Peter Jackson's 2005 version. And with a plan in place for a Godzilla vs King Kong film, it's easy to think that this increase in stature is so that the great ape stands a better chance against Japan's most iconic kaiju. But director Jordan Vogt-Roberts says that's not the case at all.
"If you stand in front of a 25-foot gorilla you’re gonna think, 'That’s a really big gorilla,'" Vogt-Roberts recently told SFX Magazine. "If you stand in front of a 100-foot-tall bipedal ape with a sense of nobility to it, I want your brain to say, 'The only way I reconcile this is to say that’s a god. That’s something primordial that’s bigger than me. That’s something I can’t possibly understand. I am being confronted directly with myth. I’m looking at myth.'"
"So what does your brain do? How do you react? How do you pivot? How do you respond? How do you move forward? There are obvious franchise connections in terms of where his size goes and what that does, but for me the size has nothing to do with that. It’s purely about the human perception of looking in awe at something bigger than us. Because a big part of the movie is about how this universe is bigger than us."
In fact, Vogt-Roberts claimed that despite Kong's impressive height in Skull Island, this isn't even the largest he's been. That honor goes to the version from 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla. "There’s not technically a size given to him. But if you were to take scale cues, technically that Kong would be bigger," Vogt-Roberts said. Bigger maybe. More handsome? Nah.
Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, and starring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Toby Kebbell, Tom Wilkinson, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson and John C. Reilly, Kong: Skull Island opens in the UK and US on March 10, 2017.
Read more about Kong and the inhabitants of Skull Island in the latest issue of SFX magazine, on sale now. Buy future issues here.
Images: Legendary / SFX Magazine
