Noble,
sympathetic Kong reimagined for 'Kong: Skull Island'
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[March 10, 2017]
(Reuters) - King Kong is
back again - not climbing the Empire State Building
clutching a distressed damsel in his colossal clutches,
but as the mighty protector of a remote island in the
1970s.
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"Kong: Skull Island" opens in movie theaters worldwide this
week as the 8th installment of the screen classic. It depicts a
group of explorers and Vietnam-era soldiers on a secret mission
to an unexplored Pacific Ocean island that turns out to be the
home of Kong and other man-eating creatures.
The new movie, starring British actor Tom Hiddleston as a
renegade adventurer and Oscar-winner Brie Larson as an anti-war
photographer, is a far cry from the original 1933 version.
But Hiddleston says the story retains it enduring appeal.
"He (Kong) represents the power of nature and its capacity to
inspire wonder and terror that's both somehow noble and
majestic, but also it can be destructive and scary," Hiddleston
told Reuters Television.
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In the new film, Hiddleston said "there's something very
sympathetic about him."
"Kong is often always minding his own business doing his own
thing until the balance of his life is interrupted by mankind.
And it's as if he's a metaphor for the way human beings disturb
the balance of nature," the actor said.
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said he felt the pressure of
reimagining the King Kong story "every second of the day."
"You're playing with an icon of cinema and you're playing with
pop culture," he said.
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"There's been so many retellings of the story. So to break away from
that, to not tell the beauty and the beast story, to not tell the
same Kong story that we've seen over and over again and to do
something new with it - that's an incredible amount of freedom and
yet it's a very scary thing," he added.
Special effects bring Kong to life not just as an anatomically
correct ape but "a capital-M movie monster who stands on two feet
(and) carries himself with a nobility like a god," said
Vogt-Roberts.
The movie ends up partly being a story of man versus nature, where
the humans, unlike superheroes, have no special powers.
"The real superpower in this film is human ingenuity, right? So how
are these humans going to engineer their way into taking this god
down? I loved the idea of man versus gods ... And men versus
nature," the director added.
(Reporting by Reuters Television, editing by G Crosse)
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