KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 9, 2024

Caesar is dead. The opening of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes confirms the story of that character, a digital creation enormously aided by the motion-capture performance from Andy Serkis, is finished.

Nothing about the story or characters in this new installment matches the intensity of the previous trilogy of films, but to be fair to director Wes Ball's continuation of the long-running franchise, both the more recent series and the previous one had time to expand and shift their ideas over the course of years and multiple films. If this installment starts to feel like a lot of setup for payoffs down the road, it still gives us an intriguing sense of where it could be going, while offering an engaging story filled with promising characters along the way.

The characters matter here, too, in two notable ways. The first, of course, is that the heroes are sympathetic and the villains are appropriately wicked, and we come to understand exactly what they want and how their shared motive—to build a community that's stronger together than any individual is alone—has resulted in different notions of society.

The second, more important to the film's success, is that the overwhelming majority of the characters in that story are computer-generated apes, and as with the previous three films, the visual effects artists have pulled off a seemingly impossible bit of technical trickery. We believe these apes are real, not only in the way they move and interact with their surroundings, but also in how they express themselves through a kind of uncanny performance. It's not just in the faces, which must come directly from the assorted actors playing these roles on a set and having their body and facial movements digitally painted over or re-created. It's also in the eyes, which have an eerie glint of awareness, intelligence, and emotion.

No matter what, then, the film is worthwhile as yet another benchmark for how far this particular brand of visual-effects technology has come in the seven years since the previous entry in the series, which itself kept setting and upping the standard of such wizardry with each new installment. Is it a problem that the most significant element of a film is its effects? When they're as astonishing as they are here, that's a pretty decent problem for a movie to have.

The story, meanwhile, begins "many generations" after Caesar led his band of apes to freedom from, an alliance with, and a battle against the humans of his time. The chimpanzee is nothing but a legend now, remembered fondly by some apes and, as we later discover, exploited by others. In a small commune of chimps outside a city that is now more akin to a jungle (An early shot tricks us into thinking we're looking at tall trees, only for the camera to get closer to reveal derelict skyscrapers), Caesar has been mostly forgotten. This clan of apes lives in peace and harmony with each other, raising eagles as the core of their customs.

As for the plot of Josh Friedman's screenplay, it becomes a fairly simple rescue mission, after a band of outsider apes raid the village, killing some and capturing most of its population. The sole chimpanzee left behind is Noa (Owen Teague), whom we first meet climbing and leaping across the ruins of the city with a pair of friends in a sequence of vertiginous peril and that serves as an immediate showcase for the level of detail in the effects. Noa's face communicates so much, down to the sparks of realization in his eyes that he has found another eagle's nest and that the ledge he's standing on won't support his weight. How can we not but marvel at such intricacy?

The rest of this is mostly an adventure tale, as Noa searches for his clan, encountering dangers and finding allies along the way. The latter category includes Mae (Freya Allan), a human following Noa, and Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who's the sole survivor of a pseudo-religious sect that follows the teachings and example of Caesar—especially the part about apes and humans living and working together.

At a certain point, we stop paying attention to the technical particulars of these characters—the way Raka's hair hangs as if each strand has been animated to match every miniscule movement, how Noa's facial contortions of surprise look like genuinely reflexive acts, the general sense of weight all these digital characters possess in their motions and interactions with their surroundings. The characters themselves have so much personality—and so many distinct personalities, such as Raka's calm compassion and Noa's mixture of determination and uncertainty, among them—that they simply become characters here.

As for the dangers, they primarily come from Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a self-proclaimed king and inheritor of his namesake's legacy, although his notion of a kingdom for apes amounts to subjugating captured communities and looking for the means of eliminating all humans. The third act revolves around action and teasing at what's to come in what's clearly to be a new sequence of stories, which is only disappointing because the move stops the ideas in their tracks and offers only one revelation that has nothing to do with our main character.

Then again, it does possess moments of smaller revelation, such as witnessing a gorilla soldier realizing too late how poor his choices in chasing Noa have been. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is such a technical marvel in how it makes these apes feel real that its narrative shortcomings are only relative and mostly inconsequential.

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