[5]
After wrapping up a terrific trilogy of Planet of the Apes films (2011-2017), Fox and Disney saw fit to give us another film that takes place generations later. I went into this latest film with great skepticism, and at first I was impressed. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes stars Owen Teague (It: Chapters One and Two) as Noa, a young ape from a tribe that raises and bonds with eagles. The new film opens with Noa and his two friends hunting for eagle eggs in a striking post-apocalyptic landscape being reclaimed by natural beauty. They need the eggs in order to participate in an imminent educational course about raising eagles. It’s an important rite of passage for them, so these eggs mean the world.
Unfortunately, Noa’s precious egg is broken when he encounters a rare, seemingly feral human woman in the village. He heads off in the middle of the night to find a new egg, but accidentally leads a rival tribe of militaristic apes back to the village. Noa evades capture, but the warrior apes burn his village down, kill his father, and enslave his mother and friends. Noa sets out to find where his people have been taken, teaming up with a wise old orangutan (Peter Macon) and the feral woman, Nova (Freya Allan).
Up to this point, I’m loving Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. It feels fresh. It’s beautiful. It’s emotional. But then, the movie turns to shit. While crossing a bridge over a raging river, Noa and Nova are captured by the militant apes and the wise old orangutan, a compelling character, dies (needlessly). Our heroes are taken to a wrecked ocean vessel where the militant apes live in service to their ruler, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Suddenly, we discover that Nova isn’t feral — she’s just been pretending for some unknown reason. She can speak and is actually pretty intelligent. And she wants to stop Proximus from pulling down a door in the vessel and accessing what’s on the other side. Proximus doesn’t know what’s in there, but he wants it. And the entire second half of the movie is spent in this setting, with these characters, doing these things — none of which has anything to do with the first, wonderful hour of the movie. Cut to me: Confused, bewildered, wondering, ‘What the hell just happened to this beautiful movie?’
The first half of this film is great, and it sets up ideas about prejudice and forgiveness that are worth exploring. The orangutan is introduced as a character we fully expect to be pivotal to Noa’s growth — especially on a spiritual level. But his death at the river is a crystalized, bifurcating moment for this film. It’s stark as hell. It’s as if a really good writer wrote the first half of the movie, and then a total hack took over — disregarding the messages that the first writer established, and trading in the sincere storytelling and originality for some hackneyed bullshit we’ve seen over and over again. We’ve seen leaders like Proximus before. We’ve seen apes enslaved before. The film loses all momentum when if veers into this predictable rut.
It also makes a fatal, erroneous assumption: that we will care about Nova and humanity as much as Noa and the apes. We don’t. Humans had their chance in this mythos. The apes are the heroes now, and the way Nova ends up competing for hero status with Noa only aggravates me. Near the end of the film, when these two characters say goodbye to each other, Noa — the ape — reveals himself to be a compassionate character. Nova — the skanky human — is holding a weapon behind her back, as though Noa might suddenly, completely out of character, attack her? The film ends with Nova returning to a small sequestered group of intelligent humans, and the hope that they will still someday be able to rise up and reclaim the planet from the apes. Um, no thank you. Y’all suck. Monkeys all the way.
As much as I detest the tediously boring, confoundingly awful second half of this movie and its wretched ending, the film pulls its ass out of the fire with that powerful opening hour, as well as the remarkable visual effects throughout. The last time I was this wowed by visual effects was with 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, so in terms of realism, Avatar‘s got nothing on these Apes films. Owen Teague and the entire cast deliver top-notch motion-capture and vocal performances. This film, warts and all, is now the high water mark for computer-generated characters. The eyes, in particular, seem so lifelike — even if they’re digital, I’d swear I could see straight into these characters’ souls.
With Travis Jeffery, Lydia Peckham, and a perfectly good waste of William H. Macy. Directed by Wes Ball.
Oscar Nomination: Best Visual Effects