Director – Wes Ball, Screenplay – Josh Friedman, Producers – Wes Ball, Joe Hartwick, Jr., Rick Jaffa, Jason T. Reed & Amanda Silver, Photography – Gyula Pados, Music – John Paesano, Visual Effects Supervisor – Erik Winquist, Visual Effects/Animation – Weta FX Limited (Supervisors – Mark Gee, Phillip Leonhardt, Stephen Unterfranz & Sean Noel Walker), Special Effects Supervisor – Rodney Burke, Production Design – Daniel T. Dorrance. Production Company – Oddball Entertainment/Jason T. Reed Entertainment/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Owen Teague (Noa), Freya Allan (Nova/Mae), Kevin Durand (Proximus Caesar), Peter Macon (Raka), William H. Macy (Trevathan), Travis Jeffrey (Anaya), Lydia Peckham (Soona), Neil Sandilands (Koro), Ras-Samael (Lightning), Sara Wiseman (Dar)
Plot
It is three hundred years after the death of Caesar and his name has become legend among the apes. Noa is the son of the Eagle Clan’s chief Koro. He collects an egg from an eagle’s eyrie to raise and train it as part of the upcoming coming of age ceremony. However, the egg is broken as Noa chases a human scavenger out of the settlement. Noa returns at night for another, only to come across an army of ape soldiers as they invade and overrun the village, taking all the apes prisoner and torching the buildings. Noa sets out on his own to free them, joined on the way by the wisely orangutan Raka who teaches him about Caesar. They find they are followed by the human scavenger, a girl they name Nova. They are then startled to find that she can talk where she introduces herself as Mae. Noa and Mae are captured by Proximus Caesar, the warlord behind the raids who has declared himself king. Proximus is seeking from Mae the way to open a vault that contains secrets of the past that will grant him power.
The original Planet of the Apes is one of the great sagas in science-fiction. The original series consists of Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). As the original became a runaway success, the need to expand the saga for more sequels created one of the most ambitious of all cinematic future histories. There were also two tv series spinoffs that stood outside regular continuity with the live-action Planet of the Apes (1974) and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975).
A remake was first attempted with Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001), which is poorly regarded. Far more success was had when the series was rebooted with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which substituted motion-capture generated apes for the original’s makeups. This was followed by Matt Reeves’ duo of films Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War of the Planet of the Apes (2017), which hit a peak for the series. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a fourth entry in the reboot series.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has been placed in the hands of director Wes Ball who first appeared with the Young Adult The Maze Runner (2014), followed by its two sequels The Scorch Trials (2015) and The Death Cure (2018). I must admit at the outset to be unenthused about Wes Ball signing on to take Matt Reeves’ place as the lead hand for a potential new trilogy of films. I had quite liked Ball’s first film The Maze Runner, but the two sequels felt like nothing more than empty-headed filler and time wasted continuing watching the series in the hopes that they would return to what the first film had been.
(l to r) Noa (Owen Teague), Nova/Mae (Freya Allen) and Raka (Peter Macon)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes soon put my concerns at ease and Wes Ball does a fine job in taking up the baton handed over by Reeves. The film follows on from Reeves’ efforts and there is nowhere where you could point to and say that the tone of the other films takes a marked decline. Certainly, Ball does have the benefit of husband and wife duo of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who scripted the other three reboot films, as producers, and Andy Serkis present as a consultant on ape movement. Perhaps the minor issue could be made that Ball sometimes opts for CGI spectacle – apes hunting humans, skidding down the side of a cliff, the climactic flooding scenes – when the merely dramatic would have been more effective.
Once again, the CGI team do a phenomenal job in making the apes come alive as living characters with endearing and tender expressions of their own. As with the two previous films, the actors and CGI animators combine to create some unique new artform that is neither one nor the other and provide great performances. Owen Teague is like a younger, more unworldwise version of Andy Serkis’s Caesar and becomes the sympathetic point-of-view character. The best performance in the film comes from Peter Macon as the wry and wisely orangutan Raka.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes feels less obligation to be adhere to the general outline of the original series as the previous three films loosely did. There are however overlaps. The scene where Noa and Raka discover that Freya Allan can talk is not unakin to the 1968 Planet of the Apes where the discovery of Charlton Heston’s ability to talk proves to be something that radically threatens ape society. (Although her character does make some not entirely believable moves between innocent waif and scavenger who attaches herself to Noa to someone with a great deal of insider knowledge about the way old technology and the bunker works).
There is a homage to the scene at the archaeological dig in Planet of the Apes as the apes move through the vault and come across a doll that says “mama.” There are also scenes of them finding a children’s book that depicts a trip to the zoo with caged apes. If anything, these resemble something of the episode The Trap (1974) in the Planet of the Apes tv series where James Naughton and gorilla general Urko are buried in an old underground station and uncover similar posters for a zoo. The film ends with the reactivation of antiquated broadcast antenna and Noa looking up at the sky through an abandoned observatory telescope with the implication being that that is where he is going to be seeing Colonel Taylor’s spaceship arriving.
(Winner for Best Supporting Actor (Peter Macon) and Best Special Effects, Nominee for Best Actor (Owen Teague) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
