Don’t underestimate apes: They’re always smarter than you think. Similarly, while the Planet of the Apes movies are sold as action-adventures featuring super-sentient simians, they have always been host to ambitious and evolving metaphors. For the 1968 original, Michael Wilson and Rod Serling took French author Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes (with its subtext of “intelligence: use it or lose it”) and turned it into a Cold War nuclear terror fever dream. Over time, multiple movies, and a not-so-memorable TV show, it became a cry against animal testing and for humane treatment of humanlike species. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver were hired to pen 2011’s reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the metaphor had evolved again and continued to develop across two sequels, to critique humanity’s hubristic belief that it should always be at the top of the food chain.
With that trilogy complete, and the tale of chimpanzee Caesar’s rise from experimental subject to messiah and martyr complete, the fourth film in the reboot series needed to find fresh purpose. What are these films without Caesar? Well, scriptwriter Josh Friedman has taken that question and extended it out to its logical conclusion: What is this world without Caesar, the ape that led all other apes to freedom?
For teenage chimp Noa (Teague, Montana Story), it’s one of simple challenges. He is the son of the master of birds, for in the intervening decades since Ceaser’s death his troupe has become a fully-fledged clan, living in elevated nests in the wreckage of human construction, rearing golden eagles as hunting birds. For bonobo King Proximus (Durand, Abigail), it’s a quest for power, to become more like the humans of old and to take their tools as his own. Both their idylls are disrupted by the most unexpected of interlopers: Nova (Allan), a human who somehow is immune to the virus that annihilated most of humanity, robbed the rest of speech and intellect, and put apes in charge.
Friedman’s script plays as a fascinating counterpoint to the year’s other literary-based sci-fi blockbuster sequel, Dune Part Two. Both are ultimately about religion, but Denis Villeneuve’s dissection of Frank Herbert’s sandy classic is explicit about it. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes leaves it mostly to the subtext through the inheritance of Caesar, the ape who said that ape shall not hurt ape and still sought some kind of amicable distance from the old rulers of the Earth. It is about heresy and devotion, compliance and complicity, about how texts can be forgotten and manipulated, all personified in a perfectly idiosyncratic performance by The Orville’s Peter Macon as Raka, the hermit orangutan who believes in the kindest legends of Caesar.
At the story’s heart is the question of who is the true follower of Caesar: Noa, who knew nothing of his name or works, or Proximus, who knows and claims that inheritance but understands nothing. It’s another extraordinary performance from Durand, who catches both the menace and tragedy of a creature who is wrestling with concepts that elude him. As much as you’ll hope for regicide, his is a remarkable depiction of an idiot king: He’s a more violent but no less deluded version of another self-proclaimed king, Louie from Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book, unhinged by his quest for Man’s Red Flower.
Yet the problem remains that, as with the opening trilogy, the humans are by far the least interesting element of the story. A lengthy coda gives further hints of what will come in proposed sequels, but they are questions that don’t yet seem to be worth asking. If anything, the human legacy often seems disruptive, so when Proximus’ warriors use electric cattle prods, it’s hard not to wonder where they’re getting their working batteries from. (I can’t stop mine leaking after a few months, never mind a decade or seven.)
But the apes, the apes remain the dramatic and technological heart of these films. There’s no second at which they do not appear like living, breathing entities, and the software has advanced so far that they no longer seem like people under a CG mask. But the software would mean nothing without meaningful performances. Teague especially imbues Noa with the burdened tragedy of the first born who fears failure – a fear entertainingly re-enforced through his constant harassment by his “big brother,” his father’s eagle, who he tellingly calls Eagle Son. Noa may not be Caesar’s heir as leader of the apes, but he definitely walks in his footsteps as a worthy protagonist in the latest iteration of this ever-intriguing sci-fi classic.
This article appears in May 10 • 2024.
