(courtesy IMP Awards)
In a sweeping saga like the Planet of the Apes series, it’s easy to get lost in the blockbuster weeds, to see only the big, massive moments when what’s left of humanity and apes clash, the once-set master-servant relationship now turned on its world transforming head.
And granted, the very idea of this now long-running franchise is full to bursting with some very big ideas about the nature of humanity and sentience in general, who is more worthy, if anyone, to climb atop the evolutionary leader and the way in which seemingly inviolable civilisations crumble and fall in the blink of an eye.
It’s HUGE but in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Wes Ball to a screenplay by Josh Friedman, it’s also disarmingly and quite affectingly intimate with the film spending a considerable amount of the first half its 2.5 hour running time on exploring what life is like for the apes some three hundred years after the events of the first three films in the modern iteration of the franchise (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, War for the Planet of the Apes).
As the film opens, we meet three chimpanzee friends, Noa (Owen Teague), who is the film’s protagonist and intellectual and emotional centre, Anaya (Travis Jeffrey) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) moving at great speed through the verdant, sprawling forests of the new world where humanity’s cities sit in ruined cloaks of green, humbled by the onslaught of plant and beast and now merely roosting spots of the eagles which Noa’s clan venerate.
They are out seeking eggs that they will look after until they hatch, producing the birds that will become their faithful companions, a sign they have reached adulthood; it’s a big deal and one that bonds the three friends close together in heady anticipation of the great life changes to come.
Humanity is, at this point, reduced to wandering tribes of mute, near-instinctual beings whom the apes disregard as “echoes”, not worthy of their time and energy and certainly not a concern of an ape civilisation on the rise (though they are resolutely bucolic and low-tech, more in tune with nature than we ever were), and much of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which takes place some 1500 years before the events of the 1960s films, concerns itself with what is happening in this brave new world where humanity is on its way with a vengeance down the evolutionary ladder courtesy of a virus they created.
It’s only when Noa’s village is attacked by warlike apes from a twisted collective of apes led by the monstrously authoritarian Bonobo, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) who has perverted and weaponised Ceaser’s original teachings into something ugly and warlike that Noa is forced to confront the fact that the comfortingly simplistic view of the world held close by he and his clan is far from being a full and accurate view of the world.
In fact, as he learns from his new friend Raka (Peter Macon), a Bornean orangutan whom he meets in the overgrown ruins of LAX, not only has Proximus reshaped the teachings on which ape civilisation was founded into something truly terrible, but he is seeking to further take apedom down a brutally destructive to reassert their dominance in ways that would horrify Caesar.
It’s while this massive reeducation is taking place and Noa is reeling from the kidnapping of his clan by Proximus that they meet a human named Mae (Freya Allen) who can only speak and reason but who retains the knowledge of pre-fall human civilisation, and who completely blows out of the water the idea that Noa and Raka had that humans are nothing but dumb flesh-and-blood beings with no civilisational value at all.
Suddenly all those stories wrapped in legend and the murky realms of history about what humans could do, which seemed fanciful and impossible – Fly in the sky? Talk across the world? Who can do that, certainly not humans … I mean look at them! – don’t look so ridiculous after all.
It’s at this point that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes goes from being a deep dive into the new ape culture that has supplanted our time and becomes an interesting, though not perfectly expected dissection of whether humans and apes can ever live in peace and cooperative endeavour with each other.
While it’s quite at the same level as the first three films in the prequel-era, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes nevertheless does a pretty good job of asking if its possible for the new masters of the planet to ever be anything else than the supplanted hordes these rump intelligent humans want to knock back down a peg or three hundred.
The film toys back and forth in some interesting if under-explored ways about whether trust is possible, and while there are plenty of times where Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes suggests that some humans and apes might get along, it just as quickly pours some furiously cold water on the idea, making it clear that any sort of productive rapprochement is fragile at best, completely at the mercy of world views that simply don’t mesh well together.
While many of the characters are simply serving-the-narrative fodder, Noa is beautifully well developed as is Raka and Mae and its these three that really power a film that is as much big epic action set pieces – in the third act it devolves down simply into a revenge plot of sorts that is a bit over-egged and been-there-done-that – as it is intimately thoughtful and incisive moments.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may not be the apex of the franchise but its far from being a bottom dweller either, a film that asks some very big questions in nuanced and thoughtful ways and entices us to not only look ahead to the films that will inevitably follow but to consider whether it is possible for the evolutionary vanquisher and vanquisher to live in peace, and whether there will be tension between two groups who, despite any meaningful bonds between them, are always going to fall into a race to the top where there can only ever be one winner (and psst if you’re watched the original films, it’s not us, sorry everyone).
Head behind-the-scenes …