'Kong: Skull Island' Trailer: Bring On The Beasts

Every trailer for Kong: Skull Island leaves me wondering how this movie could possibly exist. It's a King Kong movie, set in the '70s, starring one of the year's most absurd casts, directed by the guy who made The Kings of Summer, inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki, and marketed with imagery borrowed straight out of Apocalypse Now. If this movie is half as bonkers as it looks in two-minute chunks, it'll fit right in with early 2017, which has seen mainstream genre cinema taking a serious walk on the wild side.

The new trailer probably won't change any minds, but man, this thing looks like it could be my particular flavor of weird and wonderful.

Kong: Skull Island is the second feature film from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and he assembled one hell of a cast to back up that big ape. Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are the strapping leads, but the margins are full of familiar faces: Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Toby Kebbell, Shea Whigham, and John C. Reilly are also on hand to run from and shoot at giant monsters. Motion capture veteran Terry Notary, whose credits include The Adventures of Tin Tin and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, provided the mo-cap for Kong himself.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this film is that Kong is much larger than his earlier incarnations, towering over the 50-foot ape seen in the classic 1933 original and the odd, underrated 2005 remake. Of course, this is so he can fight Godzilla in an upcoming crossover...and I'd put good money on that being teased in a post-credits sequence.

Kong: Skull Island is set to open on March 10, 2017. Here's the official synopsis:

The year is 1973. Somewhere in our world, it is said that there exists a wondrous island unspoiled by man – a land shrouded in mystery, where myth runs wild. Uncharted and undiscovered. When the secretive organization known as Monarch identify this destination as the origin point for mysterious new superspecies, they mount an expedition to discover its secrets. What they find on Skull Island is an adventure beyond any human experience. An exotic paradise of wonders and terrors, where flora and fauna have fused together into an Eden of otherworldly jungle creatures.

As one group fights to escape and the other declares war on Kong, we discover that the mighty primate is at the center of a battle for dominion over the island, locked into a 'survival of the fittest' face-off with the terrifying apex predators responsible for wiping out his kin. Driven by vengeance, Kong will become nature's fury, and fight to take his rightful place upon the throne of most powerful beast on the island, revealing the story of how Kong became King.