Kong: Skull Island Trailer: 8 Things You Might Have Missed

4. Apocalypse Now References

Kong Skull Island Fire
Warner Bros.

The newest trailer for Skull Island really hammered home the fact that the film takes place in the late 60s/early 70s, around the same time as the Vietnam War, which began in the 1950s and ended in 1975.

This heavily indicates that the film will parallel said war - perhaps it never even happened in this movie universe - and even the trailer's tagline, 'we don't belong here' could be an indirect reference to the fact that the U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam were partaking in a battle that just wasn't their fight.

This Vietnam-era feel links Kong: Skull Island directly with Francis-Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a movie that took place during the Vietnam War and features more than a passing similarity to the upcoming monster blockbuster.

Both feature interchangeable jungle environments and settings, both revolve around the United States Army, and Skull Island even shares a few blatant visual cues with the seminal war movie. The shot of Kong set against the golden red sun is lifted straight from Apocalypse's poster, and the shots of flames raging through Skull Island feel incredibly like the famous explosion scene from Coppola's 1979 epic.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!