I Went "Ape" Over The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

It's bananas how good this movie is!

I’m always happy to combine family business with work by taking my pop-culture- and movie-mad nine-year-old Declan to the movie I have to write about every weekend for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. 

I see a lot of good children’s movies that way and have an opportunity to further bond with my boy. If the movie y’all selected is not family-friendly, however, I have to steal time to see it when my family doesn’t need me. 

That often involves going to the final weekend screening of the week’s big movie. If you can’t be first, you might as well be last. 

Because I see these movies late at night and, full disclosure, oftentimes I am not entirely sober, the experience can be pretty exhausting even if I like the movie. 

Killers of the Flowers Moon, for example, is a goddamn masterpiece, but I made the mistake of watching a three-and-a-half-hour movie at ten at night. 

I knew that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth installment in the current series, would be long, but I hoped it would be long in the sense that it topped the two-hour mark, but just barely. 

Nope. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is 145 minutes, or just under two and a half hours long so even though I very much liked it exhaustion set in at a certain point.

I’ve only seen the 2011 Rise of Planet of the Apes for reasons I don’t entirely understand except that the world is so full of entertainment choices that it’s impossible to see everything that you want to see. 

For example, I fucking loved John Wick and John Wick 4, which leads me to believe that I would also dig John Wick 2 and John Wick 3. 

I similarly very much liked The Rise of The Planet of the Apes and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to the point that it made me want to go back and watch the previous two entries in the series. 

I probably would have understood and appreciated The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes better if I’d seen the entire series, but you don’t need to be a superfan to appreciate its deft combination of action and emotion. 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place three hundred years after the events of 2017’s The War For the Planet of the Apes. 

Cesar, the simian leader Andy Serkis portrayed in previous films, is long gone, but his ideas live on in intense, complicated ways.

The long-dead talking ape with simian gravitas has become something more than human and more than ape in his death. He has become a prophet, a guru, a symbol, and a philosophy that wildly antithetical groups have claimed as their own. 

In the three centuries separating The War for the Planet of the Apes from The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, apes and human beings have devolved. Humans are treated as wild, feral creatures incapable of speech or complex thought, while the great civilizations the apes have created have crumbled. 

Cesar is only seen briefly at the very beginning of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but he nevertheless goes on to play a major role in the film as an idea and an inspiration that can be twisted, distorted, and corrupted. 

Owen Teague stars as Noa, a chimpanzee who belongs to a clan whose coming-of-age rituals involve securing the egg of an eagle that they will then bond with. 

It’s a peaceful, rustic existence until a ferocious band of masked apes descend upon their village with electric weapons and leave a trail of bloodshed and destruction in their wake. 

After burying his father, Noa forms the requisite unlikely but loving and supportive surrogate family with Raka, a kind-hearted and compassionate orangutan who has adopted the teachings of Cesar as his religion, and Mae / Nova (Freya Allen), an unusually intelligent and resourceful woman-animal with potentially world-changing secrets. 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is an exceedingly human movie despite being overwhelmingly about apes that are more multi-dimensional and complex than ninety-eight percent of human lead characters. 

In a harsh world, Raka is a warm beacon of hope and connection. The ape characters here are drawn with such empathy, compassion, and depth that I legitimately mourned each one's passing. 

Kill all the humans you like in movies or in real life, but you better be careful about offing anthropomorphic apes you can’t help but fall in love with. 

Kevin Durand, who can also be seen in Abigail, plays Proxinus Caesar. He’s a power-hungry bonobo who has corrupted Cesar’s teaching and anointed himself his spiritual successor, a new Cesar for a new age. 

To that end, Proximus Cesar wants to acquire the secrets of ancient, advanced human civilizations in order to kick-start evolution and make apes even more powerful. 

Humans aren’t particularly important in the film’s first act. We’re so used to seeing them in a silent, wild state that when Nova begins gabbing, I am shocked. A Talking Human?!? Now I’ve seen everything! 

That changes in the third act, which introduces the other human character with actual dialogue: a boozy intellectual sell-out played by William H. Macy, a man who has made a deal with the devil to sell out his species in exchange for a cushy life. 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a science-fiction film of ideas as well as spectacle. Its deep investment in weighty philosophical matters involving power and religion and the way faith can curdle into hatred never compromises its commitment to delivering genre thrills.

This overachieving sequel does not need to be nearly two and a half hours long, but it has a lot on its mind and a lot to say. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ fixation on evolution and primitive man suggests what Battlefield Earth might have been like if it were a thoughtful winner and not one of the most spectacularly awful movies ever made. 

CGI works better with apes than human beings or any other kind of animal. Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson proved that with King Kong. Serkis went on to prove it again with his acclaimed performances as Cesar in this series. 

Like King Kong, The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has CGI of tremendous quality as well as quantity. Its world-building is remarkable, as is its ability to make us care about talking apes from the distant future. 

This made me want to go back and watch the previous two entries, but who has the time? Not me. Oh well. I’ll get around to experiencing this whole series eventually. It just might take a couple of decades, as I am a very busy man. 

Four Stars out of Five