Top 6 Movies Like King Kong You Must Watch

People all over the world have loved King Kong for more than 90 years, and the big ape doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. There are 6 movies like King Kong, including the most recent one in the Monster Verse, Godzilla x Kong: New Empire, which, despite having Godzilla as the main character, is very much a Kong movie. Most people only know a few of them. Kong hasn’t been aped yet on TV, in movies, in comics, or in books, but other monkeys have tried. So, why waiting lets dive into some movies like King Kong.

Here The Best 6 Movies Like King Kong:

1. King Kong (2005)

His most important work is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but King Kong feels like his most personal movie. It was his gift to the 9-year-old boy whose life was changed by seeing the 1933 movie. Since 1996, Jackson had been working on this movie. You could almost say he was obsessed with it, like Carl Denham (Jack Black) was with making something huge that the world had never seen before and that would be the end of his career as an artist. At the time, it was the most expensive movie ever made. It’s one of those big swings where the director shows everything about himself, and you can feel it in every scene.

The story is basically the same as the 1933 movie, but Jackson adds a lot more to the characters, their relationships, and the world of Skull Island. Andrew Lesnie’s beautiful cinematography, James Newton Howard’s captivating score, and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens’s epic and emotional writing all help to make this movie great. That first time I saw it, I felt like people who saw The Wizard of Oz (1939) for the first time. It was like leaving the real world and entering a land of pure fantasy, a place where monster kids could always find something interesting to do. There are dinosaurs, huge bugs, secret buildings, and Kong (Andy Serkis).

Kong’s relationship with Ann (Naomi Watts) is more poetic than her relationship with Jack (Adrian Brody), which is more realistic but still very interesting. The scene where Ann and Kong are ice skating before the movie’s end is one of the saddest in modern movies because we know what’s going to happen. Compared to other remakes, this one not only adds to the original in some interesting ways, but it also shows more about the director.

2. King Kong (1933)

In King Kong, which was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Robert Armstrong plays documentarian Carl Denham, who wants to make a new movie that will be shot in a faraway, exotic place. After hiring Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), an actress who is having a hard time, Denham takes the ship The Venture, Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher), and Jack Driscoll, his first mate, to Skull Island. There, they meet a native tribe who want to sacrifice Ann to their god Kong, which is what Fay Wray’s famous scream is all about. On the island, Denham, Jack, and some of the crew look for Ann and run into dinosaurs and other dead animals.

Even though some of the effects are out of date, the movie is still exciting, and the story is so interesting that we want to suspend our disbelief so that we can believe in the magic of what’s on screen, just like people did in 1933. By the time we get to that famous ending with Kong on top of the Empire State Building with Ann in his hand as Biplanes swarm him, it’s hard not to feel sorry for this monster. It’s hard not to project our humanity onto this model figure and make him real while we let the chills take over when Denham says, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes.” “Beauty killed the Beast.”

3. King Kong (1976)

The cast of King Kong and the effects work by Carlo Rambaldi and Rick Baker are what make the movie great. It’s not quite as scary or exciting as the first movie, but it makes up for it with a big, romance adventure that could only have been made in the 1970s. Fred Wilson (Grodin), an executive at Petrox Oil Company, finds signs of an oil deposit on a mystery island. He plans a trip to the island, even though paleontologist Jack Prescott (Bridges), who has heard stories about the island’s many risks, tells him not to go. When Prescott finds an actress on a raft with Dwan (Lange), the only person left alive after a boat explodes, he has even more reason to stay. The trip to the island doesn’t bring the oil that was promised, but there is a lot of power there.

Bornean people built a huge wall around their land, and Kong lives behind it. Wilson doesn’t want to go back to the United States without something, so he plans to catch Kong. It’s interesting that Guillermin’s movie uses a key plot device from King Kong vs. Godzilla. Once upon a time, Kong was used as an ad for a drug business. Now, Big Oil has captured him and uses him as a crown-wearing mascot they call “King Kong.” King Kong works as both a remake of an old story and a time capsule of a time when gas prices were high, the president was invested in big oil, and the resources of stolen land were still being used for profit. Bridges and Lange have great chemistry, Grodin is very good, and the third act is the real show-stopper.

4. Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Vogt-Roberts fills Skull Island with strange animals, like the Skullcrawlers, and a whole ecosystem of huge monsters. He approaches the movie with the joy of a monster lover. Along with those amazing works, the movie also shows how Vietnam veterans were sent to explore the island while still carrying the memories of the war. There are a lot of visual nods to Apocalypse Now, but it never gets that dark or serious.

The film’s only big flaw is that the tone isn’t always the same, which doesn’t mean it had to be. That being said, it’s good enough to make you care about some of the characters, like soldier James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), anti-war photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), Army Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), and Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), who lived on the island after his plane crashed during WWII. There are also big steps forward in how the movie shows the Island’s native people, who are protected by Kong. Some of the most striking images in Kong’s movie history are also thanks to Larry Fong’s photography.

5. Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

They meet again for the first time in almost 60 years in the fourth movie in Legendary’s Monsterverse series. Wingard’s movie is mostly about fighting monsters, but it lacks the humanity and theme reflection on how nuclear power still affects the environment in the modern world that made the first three movies great. Yes, it’s fun to watch Godzilla and Kong fight, but there’s not much awe because most of the humans are pushed to the background or left out of the movie altogether. Where does Jessica Henwick go? Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) doesn’t change at all, and the new characters, like Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) and Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), are just vague.

Some subplots don’t go anywhere, and characters like Ren Serizawa (Shun Oguri) aren’t even linked to clear lines from earlier movies that would have added more depth. After the fact, the movie was cut up into many pieces, and all that’s left is “big monsters, crash, bang, crash.” This can be fun for a while, but it doesn’t feel like it fits with the Monsterverse as it was before.

6. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

In the newest Legendary Monsterverse movie, Kong and Godzilla meet again, but this time they’re friends instead of foes. The movie is a lot more about monster fights than it is about people, just like Adam Wingard’s last movie, GvK. Some fights are cool, but the camera moves all over the place during others, making it hard to see where the creatures are in space. Large parts of the movie take place in the Hollow Earth, where Dr. Andrews (Rebecca Hall), Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), Trapper (Dan Stevens), and Jia (Kaylee Hottle) are not present.

Kong and his friends could have been gorilla-sized instead, which took away from the human perspective that was needed to show how big the titans really are. And when people do become the center, they’re usually there to explain things or make things easier. There are parts of what could have been a great Kong movie, like Kong finding a surrogate son in Suko. But GxK adds Godzilla into the mix, and all he does is dull down the drama of Kong’s fight against the bad giant primate Skar King, who, even with his ice-breathing kaiju Shimo, isn’t a big enough threat to need Kong and Godzilla working together in the first place.

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