There isn’t enough Gas-X in the world to ease the serious bloat of Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which, at two and a half hours, is both the longest entry in the entire franchise (which has slowly grown to these ballooned runtimes over the course of its nearly 60-years) and whose contents are least deserving of that length. It brings me no joy to say this because I think the franchise is one of the strongest and strangest produced by the studio system over that timeframe, but it seems that the studio had written itself into a corner when Matt Reeves decided to head to the moodier yet somehow greener concrete pastures of Gotham City. They couldn’t do a remake of the original film – they’d spent the better part of 25 years and three films trying to get away from the perceived disaster of Tim Burton’s contribution to the series – and the open-ended conclusion that Reeves had left them at the end of their “Caesar” trilogy, with Andy Serkis’ monkey-Moses succumbing to his wounds as his tribe enters the promised land, proved to be anything but. What results is a film as frustrating and unimaginative as it is bladder-busting, where any potentially interesting ideas are smothered under what I can only assume is executive meddling by the House of Mouse. This is, after all, the first Apes movie made under the Zombie Fox label, and I’m not sure that the same studio that let Reeves make Chimpanzee Come and See as his mic drop exists anymore.
Kingdom opens with a flashback – the Apes praising and burying Caesar, pledging their eternal adherence to his ideal of “Apes together strong” — that doubles as a way to remind the audience that the apes they’re about to see on screen aren’t the ones they spent the last three films with, given that the one thing the modern movies have never been particularly good at is making its protagonists fully distinguishable from their supporting players. It then lurches forward three hundred years, directly in the middle of what Ball considers the “Ape dark ages.” Apes are still discovering things like agriculture and are mainly just content to chill in little tribes, free from the temptations of knowledge in favor of harmonious security within nature. This is the mindset of Eagle Clan, whose wooden towers our protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), grows up in. Noa’s not a particularly notable chimp in any way, shape, or form, which makes him a perfect protagonist for a movie like this. He doesn’t grow or learn very much, and he speaks in the same halting ape pidgin English that his forefathers did three hundred years ago. In short, he’s basically just Riddley Walker or one of the characters from the early sections of A Canticle for Lebowitz, without those pesky things like a coherent ideology or an inventive form of speech that made those characters interesting and gave their setting some color.
Eagle Clan eventually comes under attack from a group of outsiders, a masked raiding party from the would-be kingdom of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand, who is having a great spring between this solid performance and his work in Abigail). They burn his village to the ground and enslave his people, and Noa blames himself. After all, an “echo” – what the tribe calls humans – swiped his blanket, and had someone not gone to look for the person, they might not have drawn the raiders’ attention. So, Noa embarks on a quest to avenge his father (who was killed during the invasion), rescue his mother, and potentially liberate all of the various tribes under Proximus’s control. Along the way, he meets up with an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon, who is by far the most delightful part of the film) determined to carry on Caesar’s true legacy, and the pair confront Noa’s stalker – the human who caused him so much pain — who trails the two and steals their food. They dub her Nova (Freya Allen), and, inspired by Raka’s retelling of Caesar’s ideals, Noa tries to treat the mute, feral-seeming girl with respect. But these aren’t particularly observant apes, as when they come across a pack of truly feral loincloth-sporting humans bathing in a river alongside some zebras, they don’t seem to notice that Nova’s wearing a shirt and pants. And, hey, who knows, maybe she knows how to talk, too.
What’s so strange about Kingdom is how rarely it plays to Ball’s strongest attributes as a director – the action, while often in sweeping scope, is rarely filled with the same manic energy that made his Maze Runner films a step up from traditional YA adaptations. Back then, critics compared him to other genre filmmakers like Sam Raimi, ones who later went on to punch at a blockbuster heavyweight, but Ball bails on making the franchise his own, often drawing heavily from Marvel imagery (say, in the film’s big resolution) as much as he does from the original material. He’s keen on imitating Reeves, at least in how he tries to preserve a certain sense of psychic intimacy with the characters even in would-be “epic” moments, but he lacks his predecessor’s sense of gravitas (partially due to Serkis’ absence) and ability to escalate the stakes for our leads to truly ridiculous proportions. The fight between Koba and Caesar is echoed here, somewhat, in the confrontation between Noa and Proximus’ main lieutenant, though their charge through dimly lit yet slowly flooding ruins is much less effective than a treetop battle that utilizes the specific traits that distinguish this franchise’s characters from anything else at the modern multiplex.
But this lack of imagination or creativity informs everything about Kingdom, which is another endlessly dull slog through the same types of postapocalyptic landscapes that audiences have grown accustomed to. A reminder: three hundred years have passed since Caesar died, and ape civilization – despite having giant steel towers to inhabit and plenty of guns to steal – can’t mount a society that Dr. Zaius would consider staying at for a “Return to Monke” retreat. Ball’s inability to escape Reeves’ shadow, even when he tries to change genres to a high-fantasy-like quest, dooms the enterprise to pure mediocrity. War, if anything, was truly a blood culmination of what Rupert Wyatt put in motion, even if it made Dawn look like it was spinning its proverbial wheels on the same territory – it was the end of mankind, and to suggest for even a second, as Ball does here, that non-feral humans might be able to eventually put up a major counterattack just brings us back to square one, the same “battle of supremacy” stuff that Reeves already did in a much stronger fashion. At this point, just give up on the damn humans already: people have proved that they care much more about the apes fighting each other than they do the humans that work with them or oppose them (aside from Gary Oldman, what star wattage did Rise, the highest-grossing film in the modern franchise have?).
What bits of development we see are too small to have any real impact – the pastoral village that Noa inhabits is devoted to birding, raising eaglets to fearsome creatures who can join them on… hunts? It’s not like we see what the eagles are really used for, aside from their quasi-religious importance, but because they nest in high places, it means we can have a few set-pieces in which Noa and company rival Alex Holland for best free-soloing of a West Coast mountain range. Raka’s Church of Caesar and the Latter-Day Apes is interesting enough, but it lacks a certain amount of zing to it, and had Macon’s performance been any less skillful, I’m sure I’d find something greater to bitch about. Proximus’s civilization isn’t much better – sure, he’s an ape perverting the teachings of Caesar for personal gain and to expand his empire, which is bad because it means that Apes won’t live in skyscraper yurts and instead will conquest across the plains just like any old ugly expansionist empire run by humans. Yet it’s lost on Ball that this is how Ape society will turn out anyway. When J. Lee Thompson and company set up Conquest and Battle, they did so with the cognizance that ape-human relations would never work out, and that Caesar would ultimately be a tragic figure, an idealist whose hopes for a richer, better tomorrow would run aground on ape – or human – nature, and for all of their evolution and uplift at the expense of man, the Apes would still be, to paraphrase Alan Moore, the smartest chimps on the cinder once the cobalt bomb wipes all traces off life off our “green and insignificant planet.”
Ultimately, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes suffers from symbiotic lacks – it doesn’t have a satirical bone in its body, nor is it given a sense of irony, which are the two things that define these films when they’re at their best. Even the original author, Pierre Boulle, hadn’t refined his ability to write a work endowed with a sense of hamartia (if you hated the ending of Burton’s remake, blame the source material), and it took Rod Serling, the master of the Bierce-ian twist ending for television, to give us Charlton Heston banging his fists upon the sand in front of the desiccated and beached Lady Liberty. From then on, these films attempted to up that ante – Beneath ended the Planet of the Apes in nuclear hellfire, Escape started it anew, and each successive film at least tried to bring something new to the table to draw in and astonish an audience. Yet Ball’s film is what people wrongly accused Thompson’s two films of being: uncreative excuses to hang onto an IP – we have it, so we might as well use it – only with the make-up and costumes replaced with mocap dots. So, congratulations, you maniacs. You blew it up, dammit.