How fitting that the “Planet of the Apes” franchise continues to evolve, despite forever encircling the same inescapable themes of inhumanity — even in a post-human world — and the double-edged sword of technological advancement. Wes Ball’s lush and nuanced “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” might lack the epic sweep or revolutionary fervor of the recent Matt Reeves movies that salvaged this series from the stink that had been on it since 2001, but this well-honed adventure still manages to build on the best of their legacy, if largely because of its keen focus on the hard-fought lessons that have been forgotten from it.
“Many generations” have passed since Caesar united the apes in their fight against the human militias that sought to destroy them, and the centuries of peace have allowed them to begin developing a civilization on their own terms. Various colonies have formed across the continent, including one — the Eagle Clan — that has shaped its culture around the overgrown skyscrapers left behind from the days of man (the film’s verdant, post-apocalyptic vision of the Pacific Northwest feels like a preview of what’s to come in season two of “The Last of Us”).
Young chimps like Owen Teague’s Noa scale the buildings as a rite of passage, searching for the perfect eagle egg they can take back to their village and raise as their own after it hatches. The only rule: The chimps always have to leave at least one egg in the nests they steal from, ensuring that the growth of their species won’t come at the total expense of another.
It’s easy enough for the Eagle Clan to live in peace with the rest of the animal kingdom; apes are firmly at the top of the food chain, and threats to their survival are few and far between. Humans still exist, but their minds are so diminished by the negative effects of the virus that made the monkeys smarter that Noa’s tribe refers to them as “echoes.” The Eagle Clan are a curious group more interested in building aviaries than weapons, but even their elders don’t seem to know very much about the world around them. Maybe that’s a deliberate choice. Maybe that’s its own kind of wisdom.
Noa’s tribe are perfect innocents (at least in a biblical sense), but “progress” is a corruptive force that no intelligent species has ever survived unscathed, and there’s an ape out there who’s just discovered fire. Or worse: electric cattle prods. Convinced he’s the second coming, that ape is calling himself Proximus Caesar (a boisterous but frighteningly controlled Kevin Durand, whose character proves that even monkeys are obsessed with the Roman Empire), and when his forces burn Noa’s village to the ground and kidnap every chimp they can find, our sheltered young hero is forced to journey well beyond where Eagle Clans dare in order to rescue them — a short but eventful quest that will teach him all too much about the world at large.
Please be advised that when I say “short” I’m referring more to the distance traveled than I am the time it takes Noa to reach his destination. Running an unhurried 145 minutes, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is actually the longest installment of its franchise, and Ball’s film — written by “War of the Worlds” scribe Josh Friedman — makes great use of that time by fleshing out the philosophical conflict that will consume this story once it finally arrives at Proximus’ impressive base (a beached oil tanker at the foot of a massive and impenetrable vault whose contents might allow apes to bridge several millennia of technological advancements in the blink of an eye). There are a few scattered and harrowingly staged bursts of action along the way, as Noa is hunted by Proximus’ aggro foot soldiers wherever he goes, but his brief adventure is less defined by danger than discovery.
The first of those discoveries is a kind orangutan who lives in a reclaimed airport terminal. His name is Raka, he’s played by a warm and lovable Peter Macon (more than living up to Karin Konoval’s excellent work as Maurice in the Reeves films), and he studies the original Caesar’s “ape shall not kill ape” teachings in a way that completes the late monkey’s canonization as a simian Christ figure. Most of all, the erudite Raka provides a compelling foil for Mae (22-year-old Freya Allan, playing a role that reads closer to 12), a seemingly feral human girl so hungry that she follows Noa’s footsteps in order to eat the breadcrumbs he leaves behind on his path. Her presence triggers a skepticism that Noa — sweet, guileless Noa — never knew he was capable of, and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” draws the best of its ambient tension from the subtle distrust that simmers between them.
It no longer comes as a surprise that performance-capture tools are capable of rendering such well-shaded characters, or that skillful actors like Teague and Durand have enough trust in the process to give Wētā all the data its FX wizards need to make audiences forget they aren’t watching real apes, but it’s still remarkable to see a movie that uses it to tell a relatively contained story that mines so much of its drama from close-ups. James Cameron will likely always be in a league of his own when it comes to this stuff, but “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” doesn’t have the benefit of taking place on an alien world with alien heroes, nor does it fall back on the ballistic action that allowed the last two chapters of Reeves’ trilogy to lead with their spectacle.
Indeed, Ball’s smaller-scaled film wouldn’t have anything to redeem it if it failed to sell us on the emotional calculus taking place behind Noa’s eyes as he arrives at Proximus’ labor camp and considers what’s best for the future of his species. But the director’s faith in modern devices is well-rewarded — to the degree that it adds a rich meta-textual wrinkle to a story that sees even the most benign-seeming technology for its potential as a weapon.
That ambivalence is reflected in the script’s choice of an antagonist, as the power-hungry Proximus isn’t just a self-interested brute who lords above anyone he deems inferior and takes pleasure in treating people the way that people once treated ape. In fact, he’s a fan of humans, to the point that he keeps William H. Macy around to read him Kurt Vonnegut novels and help him learn what he can about our species’ former greatness. Proximus is a student of history, he just lacks the perspective to appreciate how it tends to repeat itself, or to understand why arming his tribe to the teeth might not be the best way of fulfilling the promise that “apes together strong.”
And yet, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is such a rewardingly cerebral journey because of its refusal to dictator-shame its villain or offer a clear alternative for the apes forced to serve at his mercy. Exciting and coherently shot as its water-logged finale might be, Ball’s movie sews a palpable sense of lament into even this story’s most emphatic moments of hope, as Noa’s emergence as a hero capable of rescuing his clan — and maybe his entire species — is always offset by the feeling that the only responsible way of bringing apes into the future would be to ensure they remain stuck in the past.
This is a far cry from the thrill-a-minute blockbuster that its early “summer” release date might lead you to expect (if the “Apes” franchise has always unfolded at a different register from the rest of its multiplex competition, that difference has never been more pronounced than it is here), and the pathos simply doesn’t run as deep as it did by the end of Reeves’ trilogy, but the final moments of Ball’s film make it easy to imagine that its sequels could reach similar dramatic heights. That’s ominous news for this franchise’s latest generation of characters, but heartening information for anyone who can appreciate the cognitive dissonance of a “Planet of the Apes” movie that leaves you with a renewed sense of hope for tomorrow.
Grade: B
20th Century Studios will release “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” in theaters on Friday, May 10.
