Brow Beat

Apocalypse Kong: Kurtz Is a Giant Gorilla in the Kong: Skull Island Trailer

Continuing Comic-Con’s parade of tentpole trailers, Warner Bros. debuted a Kong: Skull Island trailer that asks an important question: How many shots can one film lift from Apocalypse Now while still starring a giant ape? The answer turns out to be: too many. From the to the helicopter attack through the wall of flames to the painted tribesman, it looks like director Jordan Vogt-Roberts is committed to echoing Coppola rather than Cooper and Schoedsack. This seems to extend to the structure, with Samuel L. Jackson as the helicopter commander who doesn’t know the mission parameters, standing in for Albert Hall’s Chief Phillips. (That presumably makes Brie Larson the new Dennis Hopper, since she’s got the camera; where John Goodman and Tom Hiddleston fit in remains to be seen.) But the monster at the end of the book is Kong, bigger than Brando on his worst day and twice as mad, so the metaphor starts breaking down there.

Kong: Skull Island is the second film in the Kong-Godzilla cinematic universe, which began, in its most recent incarnation, with Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla. Trying to build a franchise factory around an ill-conceived 1962 Toho film may seem like folly, but cinematic universes are the new mortgage-backed securities: It’s more important that something be shoveled together into a series of films than that the source material be any good. As source material goes, better to steal from Apocalypse Now than Toho, but setting the film in the 1970s raises its own problems. Why would John Goodman travel to Skull Island looking for monsters when Kissinger and William Calley were right there at home?