Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

PG-13 and I am going to have to think of reasons why.  I'm 99% sure that it is because of ape violence, which tends to get a bit brutal.  As part of that, there's blood and horrible things happening to humanlike apes.  There's also a swear word at least once.  The movie does get a bit scary for kids, especially some of the final act stuff.  But it is a fairly safe movie overall.

DIRECTOR:  Wes Ball

The good thing about going on vacation without the kids is that you get to catch up on some amazing movies.  One of the many stressful things about coming back is having to write about all of these movies, especially not remembering all of the details of the earliest movie that you watched.  Still, I want to write this with a modicum of enthusiasm because, if I hadn't watched The Brutalist immediately after watching this movie, I wouldn't be shutting up about Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

I keep forgetting how quality the Planet of the Apes movies are.  I know that some people get pretty intense about these movies.  I tend to treat these movies as "entertaining at the time, but ultimately forgettable."  I earnestly hope that I don't treat Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes with the same level of apathy.  These movies are too good for me to be as dismissive as I am with them.  The thing that these movies consistently get right is the idea that they are world building so seriously when the temptation to laugh at the concept is right there.  But the thing about Planet of the Apes, as a long-running franchise extending back to the original one with Charleton Heston, is that they do what science fiction is supposed to do.  As much as I keep having "Dr. Zaeus" from The Simpson as the placeholder for what Planet of the Apes is about, the reality is that Planet of the Apes continues to be about political allegory and satire for issues we had.

Now, the bulk of the original Planet of the Apes seemed to be about outright environmentalism.  I don't blame it.  I would even go as far as to say that the original franchise, like Godzilla, may have softened on some of the messaging in place of something more entertaining.  But it was at least always critical of humanity.  Even if we treat the entire franchise of man v. ape as a message of xenophobia, there's at least something to watch with a strong degree of criticism of who we are as people.  But Kingdom decided to come at the satire with both fists blazing.  Again, part of that comes from me.  The allegory in these movies often isn't very thin and I appreciate that.  But Wes  Ball just made a movie about how seductive Christian Nationalism is and I am here for it.

Just because I know a handful of people will not be seeing this movie --after all, it did come out pretty early last year and I already mentioned that I'm dismissing of the Planet of the Apes movies --the movie does a huge time jump.  Can I tell you how happy I am about the time jump?  As much as I liked the previous movies, the franchise was leaning pretty heavily into the Casino Royale method of reboots by staying with all of these movies as origin stories.  I thought the Caesar narrative was tapped out.  To a certain extent, I was right.  You couldn't do much more with Caesar's narrative.  But there's someone over there at the Planet of the Apes camp that had a good head on their shoulders and understood that there was something to be extracted from all of that world building.  With the time jump and all of this canon that Wes Ball was sitting on, he was able to turn Caesar's narrative into the Christ story.  I'm not applauding that in itself.  So much storytelling turns back into a Christ allegory.  But the issue isn't Caesar's divinity, which I have to admit is not-not addressed in the movie.  More of the fun allegory comes from the fact that time and distance from Caesar's actual beliefs becomes willfully perverted.  

The movie, which still follows a lot of the tenets of a Planet of the Apes movie, hits a lot of the same notes as the previous movies but from a different perspective.  If the entire Caesar narrative that sat on the concept of solidarity and tolerance, Kingdom's message is that anyone can turn anything into a monstrous message for the sake of self-promotion.  Planet of the Apes isn't subtle.  It's a movie where the bad guy adopts the name of Caesar (in this case, Proximus Caesar) and intentionally skews the teachings so he can hold power.  It makes an incredible villain.   I'll tell you, in the first twenty minutes, I didn't think that this necessarily needed to be a Planet of the Apes movie.  But once the Proximus Caesar stuff started showing up, I was all in on this being intrinsically tied to a greater universe.  (Note:  I really have to Wikipedia this bad boy from this point on.  My writing is hot trash today.  Sometimes, you have to just power through.)  The introduction of Raka as a progressive Christian is fantastic.  Again, I read the character the way that I read the character.  Raka is almost defined by his isolation.  He's hunted by Proximus's army.  He sets up traps and lives on the periphery of ape civilization.  But because he's not part of the clan that espouses the same philosophy / propaganda, he's able to hold onto his understanding of who Caesar is. 

Now, if I'm being practical, the apes are almost allowed a little bit of leeway when it comes to embracing of Proximus Caesar.  With Proximus, the apes live in a world without the written word.  It's one of the repeated motifs throughout the film, the notion that there are only a handful of humans who are able to read in this far future.  When society embraces the perverted teachings of Caesar, it is because they have a loud voice that is giving the most digestible and self-serving version of a teaching.  We don't necessarily have that excuse.  People can read.  They just choose not to.  But we have to kind of wrap our head around the fact that Raka somehow telephoned the real version of the story without context, but that's something that could be figured out given a Raka origin --which we absolutely do not need.  Anyway, I like the notion that sometimes it takes going to the source versus the cultural expectations that allow someone to digest the faith appropriately.

But also big ups to the notion of attacking allyship.  There's a trope that I tend not to love going on in Kingdom that I'm oddly more forgiving of in this movie.  Because I'm skirting the issue, I'm going to info dump a bit more than I care to, so please be patient.  There are humans who are still able to talk.  We don't really get much of an explanation outside of the idea that communities have maintained civilizations in hidden regions off the map.  There is an attempt to regain control of the old ways.  As a canon nerd, I don't necessarily love this, but I'll forgive it because --as I've stated multiple times --I don't have much allegiance to the franchise.  But Mae finds Noa and the two take care of each other for the movie.  Initially, the relationship between Noa and Mae are the civilized discovering a stray.  Mae, in desperation, has to reveal that she's smarter than she's been letting off pretty early in their journey.  Noa instantly views this as a betrayal.  I tend not to like this trope because there would be no reason for Mae to trust Noa.  She's been abused by apes her entire life.  

But it does bring an interesting dynamic that might serve as allegory as well.  While Mae and Noa bond throughout the course of the film, there is still a distrust that exists by the end of the film.  I like that a lot. While Noa views her as more than simply an Echo, he has learned that Mae is out for herself.  And Mae always seems scared of Noa.  I do think that Noa is meant to be the protagonist hero of the movie.  I do.  There are so many objectively moral moments for Noa.  If anything, Noa might be the Paul to Caesar.  The franchise looks like it is pointing things that direction and I'm not going to fight that.  But ultimately, Noa is still skeptical of humans.  Mae's interactions, as positive as they may be, show that humans want things to go back to the old ways.  From the human perspective, it makes sense.  It comes down to survival.  But it's not a new way where apes and humans coexist.  There's the need for dominance once more.  It's a lovely mess of a dynamic and I am on board for that.  No one can really stand on a moral high ground.

I'm sorry this was written so poorly.  I hate waiting so long between watching the movie and writing about a movie.  I have so much to catch up on that I don't know if I served the needs of the blog that well.  Still, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was an absolute banger of a film.  My only detracting moment is the very clear action blockbuster structure of having a third-act action sequence that was ultimately superfluous.  But the movie destroyed!