The Planet of the Apes franchise has had one of the most interesting histories in Hollywood.  When the original 1968 film that launched the series first premiered, it was heralded as a landmark in science fiction, famous for it’s groundbreaking make-up turning human actors into simian characters as well as it’s infamous twist ending.  But, what was groundbreaking in it’s time would lose it’s luster the longer the series went on.  The studio behind the Apes franchise, 20th Century Fox, continued to release more movies throughout the 70’s, and each one saw diminishing returns and dwindling budgets, before ultimately being shelved after the mediocre box office of the fifth movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).  As the films began to feel antiquated in the blockbuster era that followed, Planet of the Apes became something of a punchline of how not to make a science fiction movie.  But the original film remained an untouchable classic to many, and it would remain an influential film for a new crop of filmmakers coming into Hollywood.  One such filmmaker, the visionary Tim Burton, tried to give the Planet of the Apes franchise a refresh in 2001.  Unfortunately, despite having some fairly impressive and more realistic looking make-up for his cast, Burton’s remake couldn’t hold a candle to the legacy of the original.  It would take another decade before there was another serious attempt at bringing the franchise back to it’s former glory.  With the release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Fox managed to find renewed life in the series with a much more effective tool at their disposable; motion capture computer imaging.  The technology could effectively mimic an actors performance into a CGI sculpted model and have that digital creation feel authentically lifelike.  The rubber masks of the old Planet of the Apes were now obsolete, because an actor could now embody their characters fully within the skin of a real looking ape.

Of course, it also mattered who was in the digital monkey suit.  One of the reasons why the newer Planet of the Apes movies worked as well as they did is because they featured a standout performance from an actor who has made his whole career through excelling in motion capture performances.  Andy Serkis, who had also famously brought the creature Gollum to amazing life in The Lord of the Rings trilogy through the same motion capture process, helped to push the boundaries of this technology even further.  Each film in the most recent batch of Apes movies keeps improving on the technology to where the seams between the digital characters and the live action environments are pretty much seamless, and Andy Serkis is so comfortable performing with the technology that every subtle gesture gets perfectly translated.  And it helps that the story and characters are compelling enough to get us invested in the movie’s narrative.  For Andy Serkis, he couldn’t have asked for a better character to embody than the ape Caesar.  While Rise certainly laid the groundwork for a strong return of the franchise, it wasn’t really until director Matt Reeves took the helm that the franchise found it’s core strength and achieved it’s greatest success.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) were critically acclaimed epic adventures that really showed off the potential that this franchise had long promised.  With Serkis’ passionate performance, outstanding visual effects work, and intense action film-making, the Caesar Trilogy as it is now called has helped to bring Planet of the Apes  back to the high place it once had in the annals of great science fiction.  But, the Caesar trilogy also was a story with a definitive end, as the franchise also put to rest it’s central character in War with a heartfelt heroes exit.  For the franchise to continue, things were going to have to start fresh, especially after the Fox/Disney merger has shaken up things even more.  Still, 20th Century Studios knows the value of one of the marquee franchises, and a new era begins this weekend with the release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place many generations into the future.  The remnants of human civilization have been reclaimed by nature, and the memory of Caesar has now evolved into the legend of Caesar.  Various tribes of Ape cultures now roam the planet, all with their own customs and beliefs that guide their internal societies.  We meet a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague) who belongs to a tribe of apes that have trained and domesticated eagles.  As part of a rite of passage, Noa must care for an unhatched eagle egg, but through an accident he has ended up smashing the one that was in his care.  Hoping to retrieve a replacement, Noa leaves his village in the middle of the night.  But on his way to the nesting grounds, he stumbles upon an ambush from another ape tribe, who are heading for his village.  He returns to find his home set afire and his whole family taken away as hostages.  With nothing left, Noa leaves his smoldering village behind to track down the marauding apes in hopes of rescuing the rest of his family.  Out in the wild, he stumbles upon the encampment of an old sage ape named Raka (Peter Macon), who devotes his life to spreading the teachings of Caesar to any civilized ape society that he can.  He agrees to help Noa on his quest, using his knowledge of the wider world to give them a better sense of where they must travel.  On the road, they discover that they are being followed by a human girl (Freya Allan).  Roka names the girl Nova, as he does for all humans, and Noa observes that she is smarter than most of the other humans that he has encountered.  Human kind has turned feral after the same virus that gave apes intelligence also took away their ability to speak, but Nova seems more aware of what the apes are saying to one another.  The trio of travelers soon find where Noa’s tribe has been taken.  They are being held at a makeshift fortress made out of old tanker ships, which is lorded over by a tyrannical ape lord named Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who keeps an intelligent human companion by his side named Trevathan (William H. Macy).  Can Noa save his family and stop Proximus from seeking more ultimate power as the ape lord attempts to open up an ancient human bunker?

One of the smart things that this movie does is that it doesn’t try to give you too much homework to digest upfront.  If you have never seen any Planet of the Apes movie before this, you’ll be able to catch on pretty quickly.  This is a complete refresh of the franchise, putting it somewhere in between the Caesar era where the origins of the Planet of the Apes started from and the far futuristic era of the original classic, allowing this movie to exist as it’s own thing.  Sure, if you have followed along with the franchise from the beginning, there are plenty of legacy call outs in the movie that will be fun Easter eggs for longtime fans, but they never take away from the story that this one is telling.  And as far as both a continuation of what’s come before as well as a kick off for what’s to come next, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes does an excellent job accomplishing it’s mission.  What I especially love about this movie is the world building.  Director Wes Ball previously worked on the Maze Runner series, and despite what you may think about the storytelling of those YA adaptations, the one thing that Ball does excel at is giving his worlds a very lived in feel.  In particular, he is excellent at blending the natural world with a mechanical one.  Here, this style is used effectively to convey a world where human civilization has fallen and all the infrastructure that we left behind has turned into ruin.  The way that Ball visualizes this is striking, with things like skyscrapers and bridges appearing as these silent sentinels in dense jungles the same way that we view the Mayan temples and the Pyramids of Giza today.  A lot of it is subtly placed in many scenes, as what looks like a cliff face at first glance reveals itself to be the wall of what once was a tall building.  The mix of the natural world and the crumbling remains of the modern world is effectively immersive in this movie and the overall effect helps to make the story all the more engaging.  It does make me excited about what director Wes Ball has next for us, as his next project will be a live action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda video game series; a job that I believe he is well suited for given what he has done here.

The film’s narrative is also effectively told, if at times a bit predictable.  One thing that I do like is that the movie keeps the focus small, even though the setting is epic.  Like the Caesar movies before it, Kingdom doesn’t try to telling a grander, global story and instead focuses on the the journey that our central characters take.  The previous films gave us a sense of the greater world conflict through just the eyes of Caesar, and this movie does the same with Noa.  It is ultimately his story, and the movie works best when it allows the world to unfold through his experience.  What I thought was especially surprising in this movie was the fact that it had some interesting things to say about religion.  We see both the good and the bad influences that religion can have on a society, especially one that is still in it’s infancy like those of the apes.  In this movie, Caesar has become something of a Christ figure to the apes, and their attempts at proto civilizations on the foundations of their newly enlightened consciousness seem to circle around their creation of a new faith.  In some cases, there are apes like Roka who take the teachings of Caesar and try to use them to seek peaceful ways of life.  Then there are others like Proximus who use the name and words of Caesar to justify his own evil deeds.  You can see the hallmarks of early Christianity in these different followers of Caesar, and I thought that it offered a very interesting subtext to the movie.  It also plays well into Noa’s story, as his journey begins without him being aware of this new religion to begin with.  By movie’s end, he soon learns that the apes view much of Caesar’s example through his own growth as a leader.  The movie also delivers this subtly, as it doesn’t try to hit you over the head with any obvious Christ allegory.  This is still a Planet of the Apes movie after all, and most of the film still centered around a lot of action, which can sometimes feel like overkill as it’s just adding more run time.  Still, allegory has also been a trademark of the Apes franchise, so it is still in character for the franchise.

With the story starting fresh, it is definitely important to create engaging characters for us to follow along with.  The issue that this movie had to overcome was that it was going to be missing the character of Caesar, who has been one of the most captivating characters in recent cinema history.  Andy Serkis also set a high bar when it comes to how to act through motion capture, as his performance was so nuanced and powerful even through the CGI transfer.  Thankfully, the cast of this movie manages to rise to the challenge.  It really shows how far this motion capture technology has advanced to where the filmmakers can confidently fill nearly all the roles with actors performing through CGI avatars.  As the newer Planet of the Apes movies have come along, the ratio of live action to motion capture characters has completely flipped.  Now the humans are greatly outnumbered by the apes, with only two major roles given to the humans this time around.  The most daunting assignment was to have a character to stand out in the place of Caesar as the new protagonist.  Thankfully, Noa is a compelling enough character to carry this movie.  It helps that he’s a bit more juvenile than Caesar was, only just reaching manhood and not as confident in his abilities from the start.  He’s a character with a lot of room to grow and that he does throughout the movie.  Owen Teague also does a fine job of making him a well rounded character as a result, and he perfectly picks up from where Andy Serkis left off in creating that balance between simian and human.  Peter Macon also brings some wonderful levity into the story as Raka, the one character who’s able to bring optimism and humor into an otherwise bleak world.  And though he doesn’t factor in until late into the movie, Kevin Durand is an effective menacing presence as Proximus.  Sadly it’s the human characters that feel the least fleshed out.  Freya Allan does the best she can as the human girl Nova, and she does convincingly shares her scenes with her digital co-stars, but the script sadly makes her character a bit too much of an enigma.

The film’s visual are also impressively realized.  I already talked a bunch about the world-building, but the reason why it works so well is because the film balances it’s visual and practical effects to perfection.  The practical elements work because there are actual actors interacting in natural environments.  The motion capture technology allows for actors to still perform their scenes on set with special tracking suits, and the technology has improved to the point where they can actually do this effect outdoors without the need for a controlled digital environment.  That’s why these Planet of the Apes movies have been the best showcase for this technology, because it’s been the best testing ground for every new challenge for the digital artists.  The CGI models for the apes are also becoming more impressive with each movie.  At times, even in fully sunlit scenes, the ape characters hold up really well and maintain their integrity to the point where you really believe that they are there.  The visual effects also do a great job of giving this movie an epic feel.  This movie definitely feel like the grandest we’ve seen so far in this series, and this is a movie that demands being seen on the biggest screen possible.  There’s also a lot of other things to like about the presentation of the movie, including the musical score.  Longtime Planet of the Apes fans will appreciate the call backs to past musical scores in the franchise, including an especially noticeable reference to the original film’s theme written by the legendary Jerry Goldsmith.  The new composer John Paesano clearly is familiar with the soundscape of this franchise, and this is one of the most ambitious sounding scores we have heard yet.  Overall, it elevates the Planet of the Apes  into a different register, and it’s a clear sign of the new direction that the series wants to take in the future, going from the camp of the original movies, to the grittiness of the Caesar Trilogy, to what is likely going to be a more epic adventure in what is anticipated to be a whole new trilogy.

Regardless of where the franchise goes next, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is still a great stand alone movie on it’s own that both honors it’s legacy but also lays the groundwork for something special yet to come.  It shows that this half century old franchise still has a few tricks up it’s sleeve left to play.  What has really worked to the franchises favor is it’s embrace and practical use of motion capture technology.  The series knows how to make the best use of this tool by having it be no more than just the extension of the actors performance.  If the character and the actors portraying them weren’t compelling, no one would care and it would be just a gimmick.  But actors like Andy Serkis have shown that you can not only give a captivating performance through motion capture, you can even make it Oscar worthy, and it’s characters like Caesar that have proven how best to work with this kind of technology.  Kingdom shows us that we can now fill a whole cast of characters with actors performing through this technique, and that indicates some very promising new horizons that could be possible in the future for cinema.  Even still, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is still a worthy addition to this long running franchise, and it is well worth seeing, especially on a big screen.  It’s lush world building and surprisingly philosophical story also make it a richer film experience than you would expect.  It may not consistently reach the emotional heights as some of the Caesar Trilogy movies, but there are still plenty of exciting and memorable moments to help make this more than just your average popcorn flick.  I certainly am excited to see where the series goes from here.  Will it actually dove tail into the events of the original classic? Imagine if all of this is going on while Charlton Heston’s astronaut is still lost in deep space.  I’m happy that this movie is dependent on trying to tie all the lore together, but rather is more interested creating new bits of lore to expand upon.  In any case, we have an exciting future to look forward to with this new chapter in the Apes franchise and Kingdom is an adventure worth taking this summer at the movies.

Rating: 8/10