Post by Dracula on May 18, 2024 18:08:00 GMT -5
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes(5/10/2024)
I’m not sure how much I’m in the minority about this but for the most part I thought the trilogy of Planet of the Apes movies that emerged in the 2010s was only ever “good” to “very good” and never really great. I guess that isn’t too much of a hot take; while successful they were never the biggest of blockbusters and they weren’t necessarily showing up on critics’ annual top ten lists and people didn’t seem too shocked or outraged when the movies didn’t compete for awards, but just the same it always felt like I was a little less impressed with them than most of the people on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I gave all of them three and a half stars and was pretty appreciative that they were summer blockbusters that took themselves seriously and weren’t about superheroes, in a lot of ways they were everything that people asked for. And yet, I don’t know, they always seemed a bit more shallow beneath their surface than a lot of people made them out to be and that they never quite lived up to their potential and I don’t think War for the Planet of the Apes really closed out the trilogy in a particularly satisfying way either. So I guess I wasn’t dying for more and was actually kind of surprised to hear that it was coming back this year for a fourth film and I think I had reason to be skeptical. Firstly, adding a fourth film to a franchise is always a bit iffy given how central the trilogy is to film culture, but also because the new director they brought on, Wes Ball of The Maze Runner fame, does not have a terribly impressive resume and is generally a downgrade from Matt Reeves. Still, I was down to give this a chance and I’m glad I did because I think this actually might be my favorite 21st Century Planet of the Apes to date.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes picks up several generations after the death of Caesar and ape civilization seems to have spread out and fractured a bit. Early on we meet Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee who lives in a somewhat remote area with a clan of apes who seem to have built a culture around falconry. That mostly idyllic existence is smashed when their village is raided by a band of apes following the command of a charismatic leader calling himself Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Most of the clan is kidnapped and taken away but Noa is left for dead, but he actually survives the attack and for the first time travels out of his valley in an attempt to find them. Along the way he meets an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon) who believes himself to be a true follower of the Caesar we met in the previous trilogy and explain that Caesar’s teachings had been distorted by people like Proximus Caesar. Along the way they also meet a human woman they call Nova (Freya Allan), who like most humans in this era appears to be non-sentient and mute, and decide to let her follow them around a bit as a curiosity but as the trio starts to approach Proximus Caesar’s domain it becomes apparent that there’s more going on in this world than meets the eye.
While the last two Planet of the Apes movies were set in the immediate aftermath of the apocalyptic virus that would lead to the swap of dominant species at the center of this whole franchise, they were still very much movies about that transition. With this one we’re fully post-apocalyptic. There are still traces of that former human society like ruined buildings that have been covered over by vegetation but most of the apes we encounter have no memory of a time when humans ruled the earth and very much take their own superiority for granted. We have not, however, left behind the legacy of Caesar and the events of those earlier movies; in fact the extent to which his memory has filtered out into ape society and been twisted by some is one of the most interesting aspects of the film’s first half. We learn that Caesar’s memory has been warped by the film’s villain to justify his own regime in much the way religion is used to justify dictatorships throughout history, but the “true” disciples of Caesar don’t exactly have the whole picture either. All of this would perhaps be a bit stronger as a theme if that original trilogy had done more with Caesar in the first place (his stated philosophy was never that deep) but it’s a resonance that’s very in keeping with how this franchise has always been used to mirror human history and society.
The “wow” factor of the CGI apes has perhaps diminished a little four movies into this series but it’s effective as ever here and it’s kind of amazing that we’ve gotten to the point where the vast majority of characters in a movie can be computer generated and it’s neither prohibitively expensive nor distracting. We have a new roster of characters here, which isn’t too much of an issue given that Caesar was pretty much the only consistent character from the original trilogy this isn’t that jarring. I’m not sure that Noa is necessarily the strongest of protagonists as his arc mostly just boils down to a pretty standard Joseph Campbell hero’s journey, but he works well enough as a point of view character and he works off the side characters like Raka well enough. What I’m more interested in is the role of humans in this world, which I don’t want to spoil too much but which is bigger than it might seem initially. In the original reboot trilogy Humans started as standard casual oppressors in the first film, were part of an uneasy peace in the second one, and are more straightforward villains in the third one. Here we’re a bit less clear on what to think about humanity; their main onscreen representative is pretty sympathetic but they may be representing an agenda that could be pretty bad for ape-kind.
**** out of Five
