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Monkey Business as Usual
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When it was first announced that the _Planet of the Apes_ franchise
was going to get the reboot treatment back in the now-Jurassic era of
2011, you could feel a familiar cynicism kick in: Great, another
recognizable intellectual property getting trotted out for a quick
cash grab, just in time for a corporate quarterly report. We'd finally
washed the ashy taste of that ill-advised Tim Burton remake from 2001
out of mouths, and now Warners was going back to the '70s pop culture
well, ready to ransack musty nostalgia from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z.
Somewhere out there, a pasty Gen-X fanatic pounded the floor of his
apartment in front of his rare, still-boxed Dr. Zaius
collector's-edition action figure and screamed, "You'll blow it all
up! Damn you! _Damn you all to hell!!!_ "
What we got instead was the first in a trilogy of future shocks —
_Rise of the Planet of the Apes_ ; 2014's _Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes_ ; and 2017's _War for the Planet of the Apes_ — that reimagined
a world beset by monkey business in a smart, savvy and still
commercially marketable way. And the key to this new series was,
inarguably, Caesar. As voiced and acted by Andy Serkis, in combination
with cutting-edge performance-capture FX from Peter Jackson's WETA
Digital Workshop, this animal went on a hero's journey from every-
chimp to liberator, leader to martyr. Caesar became both the
conscience of his species and its spokesperson, empowering his fellow
apes while attempting to bridge the gap between primates and people.
Thanks to Serkis, this character became not just a focal point for the
franchise but its emotional center, its soul. The supreme irony is
that an actor burdened by technology ended up blessing an entire
trilogy about simian supremacy with a sense of humanity. It's truly
one of the great, extended screen performances of the 21st century.
_Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,_ the fourth installment in — what
are we calling this, the _Ape_ verse? — begins where _War_ ends, with
the mighty Caesar being given a warrior's farewell, funeral pyre and
all. We then skip forward "many generations later," and within minutes
of entering this brave new backwards world, you start to wonder if the
void left by this character's absence simply can't be filled. There
will be fresh heroes to cheer, fresh villains to hiss at, fresh
metaphors about power and corruption and history repeating itself to
scratch your chin over. Yet a curious sense of staleness starts to set
in even before the first act of director Wes Ball's entry pits ape
against ape. And without a compelling chimp for all seasons like
Caesar acting as a centrifuge for all of the allegorical bluster, and
narrative bathos, and set pieces in which pixelated gorilla bashes
pixelated orangutan while a pixelated tsunami threatens to wash them
all into pixelated oblivion, you're essentially left with nothing but
Blockbuster 101 grandstanding. Welcome to the emptiest of
monkeyhouses.
VIDEO
Our good guy this time around is Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimp
who's part of a tribe living in the vegetation-covered ruins of
California. His father is a "master of birds," who has trained eagles
to help them hunt; Noa and his best friends, Anaya (Travis Jeffery)
and Soona (Lydia Peckham) have just gathered nest eggs, in the hope of
nurturing their own birds of prey. Returning home, they stumble across
a swath of cloth with an odd smell. They believe it belongs to an
"Echo," their word for the human scavengers who live in the forbidden
"valley beyond."
Noa brings this garment back to his dad and the village elders. He
soon spies its owner, a feral young women (Freya Allen) lurking around
the encampment. Then a rival group of apes, led by the brute Sylva
(Eka Darville), attack the tribe and burn everything to the ground.
Noa is left for dead, and whatever friends and loved ones who have
survived are led away, to be used as slave labor for …something. He
begins to follow the tracks of these aggressors, vowing revenge
Along the way, he meets a wise orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon).
This older primate is part of the Order of Caesar, a group who treats
the long-dead hero's words as gospel and studies the ancient human
texts known as "books." He, too, is familiar with these warlike apes,
having just lost what appears to be a life partner during a similar
massacre. (They attacked my village, Noa tells him. " _He_ was my
village," Raka says, gesturing to a skeleton sitting on a pyre.) Soon,
the girl joins them. The orangutan names her Nova, after the mute
child Caesar rescues in _War._ Her real name is Mae, and she not only
talks, but is part of a settlement hoping to return to the days when
apes and people lived side by side. She also wants to find these bad
guys for reasons of her own.
The problem is: The bad guys are very much after her as well. And when
she and Noa are captured, they're led along a beach in a blatant
callback to the 1968 original's climax. There's no Lady Liberty
awaiting them, but there is rusty, wrecked battleship that is the
equivalent of a Bond villain's lair. This where a demagogue named
Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) reigns supreme. He's twisted the words
of their simian savior to his own ends, turning "Apes, Strong,
_Together!_ " into a campaign motto. Noa discovers that this would-be
great ape is obsessed with a giant vault guarded by impenetrable steel
doors. It's filled with human weapons and tech. Caesar 2.0 laments
that Darwinism takes so damned long. But with the treasures that lay
within that sealed-off area, he figures he can catch up far more
quickly to _Homo sapiens_ in terms of destroying everything and
everyone in his way.
Eka Darville in 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.' 20th Century
Studios
There's more, from Mae having a secondary agenda to being trapped
there beside Noa to William H. Macy dropping by to play the future's
version of a Vichy government official during WWII. Blows are thrown,
sacrifices are made, last-minute rescues are made and any number of
CGI disasters befall our heroes before a semblance of order is put
back in place. The notion of a prophet's teaching being perverted for
a power-monger's personal gain isn't exactly new, but it will strike a
chord with anyone familiar with organized religion and the past 50
years of the G.O.P. And while the trilogy used the concept behind
Pierre Boulle's 1963 cult novel and that original five-movie run to
imagine how the ape revolution played out, _Kingdom_ is the first of
the reboots to essentially treat the monkeys-are-our-masters scenario
as a given. It's close kin to that 1968 Charlton Heston ground-zero
for the series, in every way except quality, excitement and getting
you invested in any sort of outcome.
To put it bluntly: It's a big evolutionary step backward for a
franchise that distinguished itself from the barrel of blockbuster
I.P. crowding the multiplex and your pop-cultural bandwidth a little
over a decade ago, and had kept up a consistency that felt rarer and
rarer among multi-movie universes. _Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes_
may bring its battle against humans and apes to something like a draw
here, but it certainly loses the war over maintaining your interest.
Serkis served as a consultant here, but you'd kill to have him in
front of the camera, casting his unique spell of performance-capture
magic again. Because given what we've got left without him leading the
charge, the only thing concerning viewers regarding this _Planet of
the Apes_ entry is how quickly you can escape it.
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