The First Kong: Skull Island Trailer is Dazzling

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures had been teasing us with Kong: Skull Island tidbits for the last week, but finally, the new trailer aired  last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. This is our first really good look at the largest, meanest Kong of all time. 

It only takes 39 seconds for King Kong to make his appearance in the trailer ("is that a monkey?" a member of the helicopter crew innocently asks), but it's clear from our first glimpse this is the most colossal Kong iteration we've ever seen. We also find out that hubristic military personnel have been bombing the mysterious Skull Island as a way to map it, echoing the disastrous, unintended consequences of nuclear testing that led to Godzilla's resurgence in many of the classic Tojo Studios films.

Skull Island follows a team of explorers, led by Colonel James Conrad (TomHiddleston, with a name no doubt paying homage to "Heart of Darkness" author James Conrad) as they venture onto the primordial island to find a missing man and a mythical serum. Naturally, they also are plunging right into the heart of Kong's home. The trailer reveals that the missing man is played by none other than John C. Reilly, whose has been living with human inhabitants on the island. There, he informs Conrad's team, Kong is God, and a somewhat benevolent one at that. When the team reasonably asks if Kong is god, who are the devils, we finally glimpse who the real antagonists of this film are—the skull crawlers.

The trailer's two and a half minutes of wondrous images, from Kong himself to a massive oxen-like creature to a spider the size of a city bus. The skull crawlers, it should be noted, remind us of the M.U.T.O's from Gareth Edwards' Godzilla, which makes sense considering John Goodman's character plays a scientist from Monarch, the mysterious organization that was connected to those beasts in that film.

The rest of the cast includes Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Shea Whigham and Toby Kebbell. Your director is Jordan Vogt-Roberts, with a script by John Gatins and Max Borenstein. 

Kong: Skull Island is set to open on March 10, 2017. Check out the trailer below.