There’s a new Honest Trailer in town, and this time Screen Junkies have decided to target Kong: Skull Island. Initially this might seem like a very bad idea and pretty badly timed. After all, it’s only been a few short weeks since the director of Kong, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, tore into CinemaSins for over-analysing the Monsterverse movie and slated them on social media. However, there is a special twist to this episode, which may come as a surprise to those expecting more online fireworks, and it makes it an especially “honest” edition.

Vogt-Roberts called out CinemaSins during August and sent out a flurry of tweets where he derided their form of criticism, calling their critiques “oddly nasty” and just needless nitpicking. He backed this up further in the following days, with further tweets explaining why it wasn’t good satire in his opinion. Needless to say it opened up some lively discussions on social media and caused differing views. So it seemed like further jokes about Kong might cause some more friction. Happily, that’s just not the case at all.

The Honest Trailer (which can be viewed above) starts as normal with Epic Voice Guy describing the film. He praises the monster fights, but gets confused by the Vietnam analogies. He does amusingly compare Kong to Batman at one point, as he loses his parents and saves a Yak, but does question his unfeasible stealth abilities. Then it goes off the normal format, as Epic Voice Guy is interrupted by Vogt-Roberts himself in the Screen Junkies studio. “I should have known if we criticised your movie, you’d appear“, he quips topically.



It turns out that the director is his own worst critic and hands a prepared script to Epic Guy, where he turns out to be even more brutally honest than Screen Junkies. He points out the movie’s structural problems, the way in which the actors talents are wasted, that there are too many characters, and WAY too many helicopters. “I bathe in pain“, he says as he feigns an emotional breakdown. It’s probably the most meta episode since Ryan Reynolds appeared as Deadpool in his own Honest Trailer. In fact, Epic Voice Guy even says, “This is a really weird Honest Trailer“.

It’s a fun episode, and all credit to Vogt-Roberts for mocking himself and getting so into the spirit of it. It’s a nice twist on all the bad blood that’s been circulating regarding the film and the satirical takes on it, whatever your own personal opinion is. Apparently, as revealed in footage during the trailer, it was set-up between the group and the director back in July well before his Cinema Sins tirade. For their part, Epic Voice Guy states that they aren’t capitalising on the drama, but the timing was great.

With Vogt-Roberts previously revealing that he won’t do any more monster movies and his most recent project being a live-action trailer for the video game Destiny 2, it’s a cool and enjoyable way for him to draw a line under the more negative aspects of Kong: Skull Island.


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