Packed with prepositional phrases, even the title for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is long. But for the love of emptied bladders and frayed attention spans, why does a movie with a remedial grade school plot need to be almost 2.5 hours? This isn’t shaking-fist-at-clouds grumpiness. Okay, only a little. But just like last week’s The Fall Guy, this ape epic would have been a far superior film if it lost a half hour. On the plus side, no orangutan makes a Johnny Depp domestic violence joke.
The first hour of the tenth Planet of the Apes movie feels, if not fresh, at least pretty and fun. Noa (Owen Teague) and his two best monkey buds must retrieve eggs from nests that are super-duper crazy high up in the sky. This is because their village trains eagles. What exactly they train them to do is oddly never really explained. Telemarketing maybe?
We never find out, in part, because their clan gets attacked by disciples of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Although he has taken the name Caesar from the primate at the heart of the previous Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy, it has been “many generations” since then, and he has no actual relation. He’s just using a beloved, respected name that stood for peace and compassion in a way that inverts everything the original namesake stood for. Jesus Christ, there’s an obvious metaphor somewhere!
Noa heads out to rescue the surviving members of his tribe. He meets Raka (Peter Macon), who tells him all about how humans and apes once coexisted, until the O.G. Caesar – monkey, not Julius or salad – got a medicine that introduced a virus that made simians smart enough to talk and homo sapiens dumb. Sorry, dumber. Shortly thereafter, Raka and Noa meet Mae (Freya Allan), a human who has secrets that may be considered spoilers. The third act involves a monkey-adjacent MacGuffin and absolutely no social allegory, which is remarkable for a series that has been filthy with moralizing.
As he demonstrated with The Maze Runner series, director Wes Ball can helm the gorilla poo out of an action sequence. Honestly, until writer Josh Friedman’s script becomes interminable about halfway through, Kingdom was a simplistic but kinetic adventure movie trading on well-trod themes. Like Avatar, but if Avatar was good. Just noticing now, Josh Friedman wrote the Avatar sequel, and a lot of things are suddenly making sense…
Noa doesn’t so much grow over the course of the film as he simply endures. Mae is a grating, hateable plot device made flesh. Proximus Caesar is fairly menacing but sparingly used. The only saving grace is that the action is engaging and the effects are almost impossibly good. For some reason, folks poo-poo CGI advances like we don’t still “ooh” and “ahh” at fireworks. It is fun, and oddly inherently human, to marvel at technological spectacle. It can’t (entirely) make up for a threadbare script and a lack of purpose, but it sure is a good time.
The disappointment is mostly that a series that has frequently leaned into both the weird and the “thematically important” chooses neither here. This is as safe and generic as blockbuster entertainment comes. We aren’t left standing in further judgment of humanity’s shortcomings or asking if Marky Mark is gonna schtup an ape (thank you Tim Burton). We’re just left with an admiration for animators and a wasted half hour of life we don’t get back.
Grade = B-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Siddhant Adlakha at Mashable says “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is many things, from an emotionally-driven adventure romp to a moving character piece, but its success as both is also partially rooted in the way it approaches the text of the recent trilogy: as cultural building blocks for two different ideas of ape society.”
Dana Stevens at Slate says “But despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.”
Matt Fernandez at Geeks of Color says “It’s nothing too intense and won’t radically shift your views, but compared to the bland explosion fests that tend to dominate the summer box office, I enjoyed the opportunity to do some thinking.”