Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (or Kingdom, for short) comes seven years off the coattails of its previous trilogy, all of which are part of the much larger 56-year-long spanning franchise. Taking place a long 300 years after the reign of Caesar, the ape who led the higher-thinking primates after exposure to a virus that enlightened them but caused regression in humans, the now-dead leader has taken on a messiah-like image among his folk. As it often goes with religious thinking, Kingdom finds the apes, now ruling over the overgrown environments of Earth, in separate factions – each prophetizing the word of Caesar in various ways or, such as in our protagonist’s case, choosing to remain willfully ignorant of his existence.
Naive and innocuous, Noa (Owen Teague) has matured within a sheltered community that values and reveres the aviary creatures of the sky, the eagle. On the dawn of a ritual set to bind him to one, Noa inadvertently encounters a group of violent apes dissimilar to those of his community who go on to set his home ablaze in the name of Caesar. This act of destruction and rage sets Noa down on a hero’s journey to save his family where he encounters much more than he bargained for, including a human, Mae (Freya Allan), determined to change the trajectory of her kind’s future and a totalitarian ape leader by the name of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).
Noa (Owen Teague) bonding with a revered Eagle.
Director Wes Ball undeniably had quite big shoes to fill with this new iteration of the Planet of the Apes. What director Matt Reeves did with Dawn and War, and director Rupert Wyatt before him with Rise are nothing short of beloved. They’re worthy of the summer blockbuster title yet packed with heart and emotion and riddled with heart-poundingly massive action set pieces. These “ape movies” are even chock full of precise social commentary with the previous trilogy successfully touching upon the inevitability of violence among humans and the tragedies of war. They question the moral lengths of protecting loved ones, the weight of grief, sorrow, and vengeance, all portrayed through the fascinating dynamic between monkey and man.
And while Kingdom does remain aligned with the franchise’s tendency to offer much food for thought – dissecting how scripture and history are interpreted in vastly different ways among various groups and twisted and mangled to serve oneself, the impact one’s upbringing has on their outlook on life, discussing the moral conundrum of whether certain means justify an end – the film drops the ball in almost every other department. What made Kingdom’s predecessors work so well is that it focused on building a strong foundation of characters to expand and build upon, and in this film, the main characters could be replaced with slabs of rock and no difference would be made. Their existence is simply to move the film forward. With the exception of Raka (Peter Macon), a pacifistic orangutan who claims to be the last true follower of Caesar, and the underutilized villain, Proximus Caesar, the characters in this film are mere sketches of the prior films’ character portraits. They even bear resemblance to those who came before in the way they behave and what purpose they serve in the story, but these shadows never come close to leaving the emotional impact their predecessors did.
Director Wes Ball expands upon the world and invites us to see what the Planet of the Apes truly looks like under ape reign with today’s technology.
Noa acts as a stand-in for Caesar with his bravura and self-sabotaging empathy towards humans. Dar (Sara Wiseman), Noa’s mom, acts as the emotional anchor as much as Caesar’s wife, Cornelia, did. Soona (Lydia Peckham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) are the main character’s loyal companions reflecting that of Rocket’s relationship to Caesar. Because its foundation of characters is weak, it never reaches the emotional impact it so desperately craves. Kingdom tries to induce the chills of Caesar’s “No!” in Rise or his and Koba’s nail-biting showdown in Dawn but its attempts fall incredibly flat – the filmmakers’ dramatic intent only revealed thanks to a crescendo of music that scrambles to manipulate the audience’s emotions to no avail.
Aside from Durand’s Proximus Caesar and Peter Macon’s wise Raka, the other performances land in “enough to get the job done” territory that certainly doesn’t help the film’s inability to rouse any sort of sentiment. The action sequences featured in the film also suffer due to the poor characterization. Because the screenplay has failed to make the audience care for them, there is no anxiety or tension when the apes are on the precipice of death or the few times they encounter the dangers of Proximus Caesar.
Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) preaching the word of their now prophet, Caesar, and keeping his subjects under an iron fist.
Without a compelling, fearsome villain, writers Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver have crafted a film devoid of any stakes or driving force behind it. For the first hour and twenty minutes, Kingdom has about as much appeal as a never-ending safari in the blistering heat. The vistas seen through Wes Ball’s camera are impressive and the SFX are nothing short of astounding with the level of detail on these apes and emotion reflected through motion-capture (as they always are). But with a sluggish pace and nothing pushing the film forward, it’s painfully dull for lack of a better term. Even when Proximus Caesar finally appears more than halfway through Kingdom, Durand’s performance is the only thing that defines his villainous presence within the handful of scenes he’s in. Now, antagonists don’t need to be present to establish their dominance within a film. But, the writers fail to imbue any semblance of danger, introduce any stakes, or even recognize his existence until way past the mark where audience engagement has long dropped off.
If Kingdom had blazed its own path and tried something entirely new, it would have bypassed the need to compare it to others in the series but it spends its entire time attempting to reenact events and characters of prior installments. Kingdom is a far cry from what we’ve come to expect from the Planet of the Apes franchise over the past decade. Its main character, Noa, lacks any depth to carry an entire film, and while it could have been interesting to see the apes’ dynamics now that they’ve gained the upper hand in a modern context, the film fails to follow through the concept’s potential. Kingdom plays out like a shoddy cosplay of a Planet of the Apes film — sure, it looks familiar to its source material but if you take a closer look at the details, it’s falling apart at the seams.
Verdict: A Nick Skip, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a dull return to the franchise that does next to nothing with the world at its hands. (2/5)