After 84 years and seven movies, you might expect King Kong to be taking it easy in his old age. Of course, with Kong: Skull Island—the eighth Kong movie in as many decades—hitting theaters today, it looks unlikely that America’s favorite giant gorilla will have the chance to enjoy retirement anytime soon. But the new film, just like its predecessors, is at least as much a story about otherness as it is about a literal giant ape. Throughout the evolution of the franchise, the Kong movies have held up a mirror to society—for better or for worse.

The original King Kong came out in 1933 after over two years in development—an unprecedented amount of time in an era when studios were expected to churn out movies like a factory line. Telling the story of an intrepid film crew who unexpectedly encounters the great ape on an uncharted African island, the original Kong played on mounting American fears of the unknown. The ape was a foreign and unseemly barbarian who considered himself entitled to the attentions of Fay Wray’s beautiful (and very white) actress character Ann Darrow; Ann was a consummate victim, and the men of the film crew amounted to victors after conquering the mighty King Kong.

The filmmakers swore that the story contained no hidden meanings, but there’s no denying the racial undertones of the film—even if they were unintentional. Ann was expressly written as a blonde so that her hair would stand out against gorilla’s dark pelt, and the role ultimately went to Fay Wray, a horror-movie veteran and damsel-in-distress par excellence. Even if the filmmakers didn’t intend for the movie to stand as an allegory about the evils of interracial marriage, it was certainly taken that way—for better or for worse—by the public. Much like the underlying theme of Kong as a fearsome barbarian, the King Kong-Ann Darrow dynamic stoked fears of black men as—well—fearsome barbarians who had entered modern white society with the aim of taking “our” women for themselves.

The 1976 remake of King Kong was a little more sympathetic to Kong, portraying him as a pitiable savage ripped from his surroundings and forced into captivity, but it retained the African island setting and the caricaturishly-rendered natives. The 2005 movie made a more pronounced effort to combat charges of anti-black racism—laboring to center Kong as the protagonist in the script and trading in the generic African locale for a similarly-unspecified setting in the South Seas—but the questionable backbone of the story nevertheless remained.

So what of Kong: Skull Island?

For starters, the damsel-in-distress storyline with which we are all so familiar is long gone. Instead, Skull Island takes place in the shadow of the Vietnam War, following a band of roving American scientists (and one photojournalist) in their quest across the Pacific Ocean to chart the titular island—casualties be damned. The parallels between Kong and the Vietnamese people are none too subtle: though misunderstood and viewed as a threat by the Americans, Kong is only interested in protecting his island and his people. Meanwhile, the Americans seem to consider their intrusive activities more important than the lives of the natives imperiled by their actions.

This is a welcome new direction for the franchise in the context of an increasingly socially-conscious Hollywood, but so reviewers aren’t sure whether the risk pays off. Nevertheless, for a franchise seemingly steeped in questionable politics, the decision to give the Kong mythos a thematic facelift feels like a long-awaited leap into the modern era.