Tacking a fourth chapter onto a trilogy as strong as the 2011–17 run of Planet of the Apes movies poses a serious filmmaking challenge. That series departed from an entirely different premise than the Apes movies of the 1960s and early ’70s (not to mention that of Tim Burton’s best-forgotten 2001 remake), themselves based on a popular sci-fi novel by French author Pierre Boulle. Instead of envisioning a future when humankind lives under the rule of sentient primates, the 2010s reboot series imagined the present-day moment when the apes became sentient in the first place.
Specifically, the trilogy told the life story of a single world-changing chimpanzee, Caesar (played in motion capture by the great Andy Serkis), the subject of an experiment that left him not only with increased intelligence and the capacity for spoken language but with wisdom, compassion, and leadership skills far beyond most members of our own species. At the end of the first and best film of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar is a triumphant revolutionary, having led the world’s primates in an uprising against the humans, who are rapidly devolving thanks to the same lab-grown virus that is making the apes evolve in fast motion. Over the course of the next two chapters, Caesar becomes a leader of a different kind: first a philosopher-king who resists the temptation of tyranny and, by the end of the last film, a kind of Moses who leads his followers to the Promised Land, only to die before he can enjoy any of its fruits.
So strongly marked and memorable a character was Caesar that the new fourth chapter in the saga, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, begins at the scene of his funeral, then goes on to tell a story that revolves in large part around his place in ape history. After that solemn funeral scene, we skip ahead “many generations”—apes don’t do calendars, apparently—to a world that, while still dominated by simians, has lost its utopian character. Apes are divided into hermetic clans with no communication among them. Some groups live peaceful if fearful lives, while others raid and pillage, disregarding Caesar’s primary law “Ape not kill ape.” Meanwhile, humans—at least as far as the apes know—are to them what wild animals now are to us, mute beasts who live in packs and are at best observed from afar and at worst, fought off.
After an ape-on-ape raid on his village, one young chimp, Noa (Owen Teague), sets out to find the members of his clan who have been kidnapped. On the way, he comes into contact with a wise orangutan, Raka (Peter Macon), who is keeping the tradition of Caesar alive by working toward the newest ape accomplishment, deciphering written language. (Raka is also, in a throwaway line that’s easy to miss, established as the series’ first out queer ape, having lost his male partner in an attack by the same group of marauding apes.)
The two primates set out together in search of Noa’s lost tribe, eventually accompanied by a tagalong human (Freya Allan) who reveals herself to be both more sentient and more useful than either ape expected. When they finally arrive at the oceanside compound ruled over by the tyrannical Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the travelers are taken prisoner and conscripted into the ruler’s plan to break into a vault of weapons and destructive technology left behind long ago by humans, thereby enabling ape violence on a previously impossible scale.
The director Wes Ball, who made all three of the Maze Runner movies, demonstrates a flair for helming big set pieces so that the action is legible and (within the limits set by a movie about mass interspecies warfare) believable. I was especially impressed by an early scene in which a herd of loincloth-clad humans, along with our ape protagonists, is chased away from a watering hole by a pack of war-whooping apes on horseback. The recurring image of apes riding horses over vast stretches of land evokes the open landscapes of the Hollywood Western, a welcome departure from the visions of urban techno-dystopia that have dominated the apocalyptic blockbuster for decades.
But despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being. The screenplay, by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, The Black Dahlia), is a cut above the average blockbuster in its world building and character development, but its insights into ape politics (and by allegorical extension, our own) never rise to the height of the scripts created for the Apes movies of the 2010s. Those were written by an evolving creative team that included Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Mark Bomback, and Matt Reeves (who also directed the previous two installments), and they shared a fascination with the moral complexities of leadership.
Not unlike Shakespeare’s troubled monarchs (Prince Henry, Macbeth, King Lear), Serkis’ Caesar was repeatedly confronted by both external and internal challenges to his rule. Though the bad guys he faced down were at times thinly drawn—I’m thinking of Woody Harrelson’s one-note Colonel Kurtz clone in the trilogy’s final chapter—Caesar himself always showed the full range of human/ape response to the difficult position of being a beloved and powerful leader in a moment of violent upheaval. Questions about how best to wield his power, and how much force to use in the process of holding on to it, were the character’s driving motivations. In this fourth chapter of the Apes saga, the threat of authoritarianism is entirely externalized: The antagonist, Proximus Caesar, holds fascist-style rallies to motivate his subjects to perform what is basically slave labor. He’s a worthy enough villain, played with sadistic glee by Durand and attended by a toadying human played by William H. Macy. But the Manichean opposition between the evil dictator and the gentle, bird-loving Noa is a far cry from the subtler exploration of power’s corrupting influence that was at work in the past three Apes installments.
The complexity of the original Caesar character came across mainly thanks to the performance of Serkis, the first (and really still only) motion-capture movie star. As Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and the mournful mega-gorilla in Peter Jackson’s otherwise unmemorable adaptation of King Kong, Serkis found ways of moving and speaking that made his digitally enhanced nonhuman characters more specific and relatable than plenty of the non-animated human actors around them. To watch a behind-the-scenes featurette on the creation of Gollum is to watch a new style of acting being invented before your eyes.
Now that the process of motion capture has become both more widely used and more technologically advanced, there is less novelty in the simple knowledge that these expressive and remarkably differentiated nonhuman faces have been created by actors wearing microphone headsets and reflective stick-on dots. (Even in large crowd scenes, each individual ape in the background has its own unique features and physiognomy.) But although all of the human-as-ape performances here are solid—Teague is touchingly vulnerable as the initially naïve Noa, and Macon magisterial yet twinkling as the sage elder Raka—there is no one on screen, ape or human, who can match what Serkis achieved in his creation of Caesar. It’s perhaps fitting that his performance is unrepeatable, given that the whole franchise departs from the notion that a single ape could change history forever via the technology-aided blending of human and nonhuman traits. Like the fictional apes in this new installment, the whole franchise exists in the shadow of its noble ancestor.
