The Kingdom of the ‘Planet of the Apes’ Evolves, for Better or for Worse

There may be no more astonishing image in the history of modern science-fiction cinema than the severed torso of the Statue of Liberty strewn on the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968): the torch that once welcomed the tired, poor, huddled masses reduced to the wretched refuse of the beach, with nobody left to hold it high. In the same year that Stanley Kubrick punctuated 2001: A Space Odyssey with a cosmic question mark, Planet of the Apes went with an exclamation point: Lady Liberty’s broken body was a perfectly pulpy avatar of Cold War anxieties about nuclear proliferation and shattered American democracy. It confirmed the worst fears of Charlton Heston’s wayward astronaut about what his countrymen were capable of, leaving him—and us—with a cruel variation on Thomas Wolfe’s truism: you can’t go home again if you never really left.

It’s one thing to craft a twist ending that genuinely surprises an audience, and another to corkscrew collective expectations so wickedly that it rewrites the syntax of genre cinema. If there’s a common denominator between the movies of Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jordan Peele, it’s that they’re perpetually chasing the conjoined conceptual elegance and thermonuclear impact of Rod Serling’s climactic masterstroke, which was neatly plagiarized from the writer’s own private corner of The Twilight Zone and then carefully tuned to the cultural moment. Released into a paranoid, skeptical zeitgeist in which institutions were assumed to be crumbling under their own weight, the doomy grandeur of that tableaux helped Planet of the Apes transcend its B-movie pedigree and become an instant classic.

Of the four quickie sequels released between 1970 and 1973, only 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes came close to equaling its predecessor’s sense of majesty but fell short in the absence of any similar narrative revelation (the surprise turned out to be that Heston needed the work). By contrast, Tim Burton’s misbegotten millennial remake swung for the fences for a shock ending that aped Serling’s political iconography but, unfortunately, didn’t make a lick of sense: it suggested not pieces sliding into place but a house of cards falling apart. Hence the lowered expectations for 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which, in a different (and happy) kind of twist, turned out to be a swift, witty piece of intellectual property renovation—one that reimagined the premise from the ground up and found the sweet spot between innovation and homage. Working in a likably scrappy style, director Rupert Wyatt crafted a rousing narrative that visualized its simian heroes’ upward mobility via a series of dizzying action scenes; meanwhile, Andy Serkis’s soulful chimpanzee Caesar was non-human hero worth rooting for through two solid (if increasingly over-serious) sequels.

Caesar appears in the prologue of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but only to confirm what the ending of 2017’s War For the Planet of the Apes had already suggested. After years of distinguished service as a revolutionary leader and self-styled peacemaker, history’s most eloquent primate had scampered up his last tree branch: Apes Together Sad. For all the solemnity that director Wes Ball bestows on the character’s funeral, there’s also a quiet sense of relief and even excitement at the possibility of exploring what has become one of contemporary Hollywood’s best-developed dystopian worlds in the company of some new protagonists. After flashing forward “many generations”—about three hundred years, give or take—we’re introduced to Noa (Owen Teague), an intrepid young chimpanzee who looks enough like the late Caesar that we can’t help but wonder about the shape of his proverbial family tree.

The decision to start over with a new hero is deepened by the fact that neither Noa nor any of the other major characters introduced in Kingdom are played (or voiced) by recognizable stars, a cost-saving measure that also clarifies the new film’s approach. Part of the greatness of Planet of the Apes lay with the casting of Heston, one of the most imperious movie stars of his generation; seeing Ben-Hur stripped, beaten, and humbled went a long way toward hooking audiences used to seeing their man large and in charge (ditto the joke of Taylor sitting through endless sermons about ape law; the dude brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain). In Rise, the dramatic tension—and suspension of disbelief—stemmed from Serkis’s ability to inhabit palpable, white-hot emotions from the confines of a motion-capture suit, and then bounce them off his flesh-and-blood castmates. Here, nearly every speaking role is filled by a CGI creation. If the illusion proves unusually convincing this time out, it’s partially because of rapid quantum leaps in special effects technology—the sheer fluidity of the movements makes Rise’s visuals look like cave paintings—but also because humanity has effectively become the story’s structuring absence.

For those with short memories, a set of title cards give us our bearings: the same genetically engineered virus that once upon a time imbued apes with the ability to speak and think has rendered human beings mute and also notably scarce; the clusters of battered, hollowed-out buildings dotting the skyline are—no less than that blasted Statue of Liberty—monuments to a civilization’s gradual and inexorable erosion. The imagery has a certain elemental power; it evokes no less than Alan Weisman’s 2007 nonfiction bestseller The World Without Us, a thought experiment about the environmental resurrection that would occur on suddenly depopulated Earth. Seeing what is essentially a graveyard treated like a playground is unsettling, and the sequence when Noa and his teenage pals clamber through a series of overgrown high-rises in search of eggs for a coming-of-age has a haunting ambiance—even if Ball can’t resist over-cranking the tension in the end to turn their outing into a frenetic life-or-death set piece.

A more patient movie might have spent more time establishing the rules and routines of Noa’s clan, who are distinguished by their communion with eagles—an unlikely bond that feels partially borrowed from the world of Avatar (note that screenwriter Josh Friedman had a story credit on The Way of Water) and raises all kinds of interesting questions and narrative possibilities. But even though Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is long (145 minutes), it’s also rushed, and no sooner have we been introduced to our hero’s family members and their cozy, well-hidden existence then they’ve been variously abducted and murdered by members of a rival tribe who, seemingly, still worship Caesar in the flesh, quoting his dictums in between acts of savagery. From there, the film finds its shape as a quest narrative, with Noa setting out to rescue and/or avenge his loved ones, aided by characters who exist either solely to dole out exposition—i.e., Raka (Peter Macon), a sweetly rotund orangutan who happens to be a fount of knowledge—or else to grease the wheels of the plot, like Mae (Freya Allan), a feral human woman who’s retained her intelligence (and rebellious spark) and is determined to locate a cure for her species’ debilitating collective condition.

There’s a key difference between efficiently hitting your marks and goldbricking between them, and Ball—whose previous directorial credits comprise the Maze Runner trilogy—doesn’t quite get the pacing right. He does, however, nail the crucial plot point about the “new” Caesar, who, once discovered in a location filled with references to the original film, turns out to be a hoot—a much better bad guy than Woody Harrelson’s discount Colonel Kurtz riff in War for the Planet of the Apes (a movie that demonstrated the downside of Matt Reeves’s po-faced approach). Like the vindictive, machine-gun-toting, tank-driving Koba, who energized Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the self-described “Proximus Caesar” is a bonobo: the series’ rampant vilification of this benign, highly-intelligent species continues apace. The character is played by the ever-eccentric Canadian journeyman Kevin Durand as a sly, wannabe demagogue threading his aspirations through the words of a fallen hero. Liberated from the demands of realism, Durand imbues the character with an arrogance that’s both hearty and heartless; his line readings thunder with a gusto somewhere between Shakespeare and Trump.

Literary allusions have always been part of Planet of the Apes’ DNA: Serling was a master of middlebrow moralism, and he wasn’t above flattering his audience by letting them feel smart (i.e., the scattered nods in the original to Darwin and the Scopes trial). At one point in Kingdom, the camera comes to rest on a battered copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-novel Slaughterhouse-Five—a sight gag that points up the film’s aspirations while hinting at its deficiencies. While Planet of the Apes never explicitly quoted Jonathan Swift, it vibrated with the same strangeness as a book like Gulliver’s Travels—a feeling of a world out of joint (or, as Heston bellowed, a “madhouse”). Like Swift, Vonnegut was a writer who thrived on making the reader uncomfortable both in terms of theme and prose style, but Kingdom only gets the equation half right. There are some tricky questions here about the thin line between co-existence and subjugation and the ethics of collaboration (bound up in a second human character, played by an actor whose identity I will not spoil), but they’re all shoehorned into a form that’s too conventional for its own good—one that’s crying out to be exploded.

Ultimately, it’s probably unfair to ding a movie with a $160 million budget for not being weird enough: one can only expect so much experimentation with that kind of money on the line. Still, the fact that material that was once so genuinely mind-blowing (as well as politically pressurized) has grown so domesticated doesn’t necessarily seem worth celebrating (for a primate-themed movie with a little bit of weirdness to it, try the Zellner brothers’ recent indie hit Sasquatch Sunset, which builds to a wry parody of the Statue of Liberty scene). The reason that Planet of the Apes endures as it does is because it had the element of surprise, which, over the course of six decades has been reduced to formula and routine; a passable but unremarkable exercise in monkey-see, monkey-do lacking the spark of genuine daring. At one point during one of his vainglorious monologues, Proximus Caesar shows a naive—and finally self-defeating—understanding of what evolution and progress actually means; the same can be said for the film as a whole.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.