KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES REVIEW: A THRILLING, EMOTIONAL BLOCKBUSTER

Forget the Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Planet of the Apes is the most consistently thrilling blockbuster franchise in the age of CGI. These monkeys exhibit the full array of human emotion, and that’s what makes us care about them: the slow, liquid-eyed emotion of Caesar the chimp, played with expressive motion capture tech, is the key to its brilliance.

Set 300 years after the events of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), the latest film begins in a peaceful and verdant village where young Noa (Owen Teague) and his clan live, fish, and tame eagles and have little interaction with the outside world. Noa’s parents cautiously warn him to stay away from humans, who are known as little better than pests – slow-witted, unspeaking things that pilfer food if they can help it. Due to the manmade virus that both accelerated their intelligence and nearly destroyed human capacity for it, the apes have ascended.

But when Noa’s village is attacked, he learns first-hand the might of Proximus, a gorilla-king who has fashioned himself a kind of prehistoric city-state and is seeking access to old human war technology to conquer the world. Noa is jettisoned from his clan after a violent clash with this group of more advanced and warlike apes, and is thrown into a frightening world of unknowns in the hopes of reuniting his family.

On Noa’s journey he meets Mae (Freya Allen, one of the only consistent human faces in the film), a mysterious and desperate human survivor who exhibits unusually high intelligence for her species, and Roka (Peter Macon), a wise old orangutan who believes that the true teachings of their ancient elder Caesar were for man and ape to live side by side.

Through this protean struggle for the survival of each species, the film asks thoughtful questions about our social order –and about whether we lean more naturally toward domination, or peaceful co-existence.

From the glimmer of contempt in the enemy’s eye to flecks of ash in a chimp’s fur, the texture and realism of Kingdom’s special effects are breathtaking to behold (watch this in Imax if you can). Director Wes Ball and his team understand that CGI is not just for explosions, but to make the living, breathing primates of the movie as real to us as they can. It works: once you believe in Noa and his situation, you’re in.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is more than a big-budget epic: it explores dilemmas that haunt our real world – its characters argue over the dangers of tech and proliferation of weapons – and has so much empathy for its characters you wonder if it wants us to root for the apes, rather than the humans. If this is the first chapter in Noa’s story, I can’t wait for the next.

2024-05-08T18:02:45Z dg43tfdfdgfd