I have too much admiration for the work of the special-effects artists involved to completely disregard Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but there is no denying that this fourth installment in the franchise’s most recent run is well below the standards that have been set by the previous films—particularly in terms of characterization and storytelling.
In a sense, this was inevitable, considering that Caesar—the advanced chimpanzee whom we followed from birth to captivity to revolution to death—is no longer part of the narrative. By the series’ third film, War for the Planet of the Apes, he had registered as one of the great sci-fi characters. Kingdom—set a number of generations after Caesar—seems stymied about where to go next. (One wonders if the germ of an idea prompted this installment or if the assignment came first, then the brainstorming. I suspect the latter.)
The film opens within an isolated ape community that is intricately imagined—they live in towers constructed of bits and pieces from long-forgotten human structures, where they train eagles to serve as protectors and hunting partners—but short on compelling characters. Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimp about to undergo an important right of passage, becomes the focal point, but he’s something of a hapless, frightened hero for much of the movie. Eventually a wandering human is brought into the mix (Freya Allan), then a despotic bonobo (Kevin Durand) who is enslaving other apes—including Noa’s clan—for the purpose of busting open a massive human bunker in order to obtain whatever power might lie within. None of these threads convincingly coalesce, individually or as a whole.
Led by director Wes Ball (new to this series but a veteran of the Maze Runner films), the effects team is undeniably at the top of their game. An early treetop race with Noa and his friends has the dizzying feel of leaping among Avatar’s Hallelujah Mountains, while the intimate, motion-captured facial expressions of Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan monk who is wise in the ways of Caesar, are as astonishingly lifelike as anything the series has managed. (The movie could have used more Raka.) Yet you need more than top-notch effects to make a truly stirring sci-fi picture. Unfortunately for Kingdom, its own predecessors were clear examples of that.
(5/9/2024)
