The Caribbean. Iceland. Myrtle Beach. New Zealand. Muncie. All perfectly nice, pleasant places to spend your vacation days. So why do people keep going to freakin’ Skull Island? You can’t even credit John Goodman with the excuse of ignorance—as is made clear in this first trailer for Kong: Skull Island, which debuted on Saturday afternoon at San Diego Comic-Con, he knew exactly what he was getting himself and his research crew into. And Samuel L. Jackson, the military man charged with flying this team overseas to the ostensibly uninhabited landmass, isn’t too happy about having been kept in the dark.

Things go awry before the choppers can even make an appropriate landing, as the island is hell bent on showing these unwelcome visitors its complete arsenal of chaos. The trailer suggests that we’ll see the likes of Goodman, Jackson, and Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson brave the ascension of terrors—monster and human alike—that live on Skull Island, all leading up to the big guns: King Kong, who is a lot bigger than you might remember him.

The trailer treats us to spouts of philosophy from Goodman’s somewhat pious research character and Jackson’s survivalistic soldier, but keeps top sellers Hiddleston and Larson surprisingly silent throughout. Perhaps their dialogue simply wasn’t as rich with maxims as pullable as “We don’t own this Earth” and “You don’t go into someone’s house unless you’re picking a fight,” but it’s curious that the especially SDCC-friendly Hiddleston is so severely sidelined in this inceptive video.

In lieu of time devoted to spotlighting his and Larson’s talents, the Kong: Skull Island trailer promises us that the film will be steeped from beginning to end in action and dread. If ideological head-to-heads play as large a part in the final product as they do here, that’ll be just gravy! Either way, excitement seems inevitable.

Editor’s note: Nerdist Industries is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks.

Image: Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures