Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Still Monkeying Around En Route to Planetary Apehood

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-

Apes gonna ape. And for what it’s worth, the somewhat talky Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - the fourth in the most recent series inspired by Pierre Boule’s 1963 novel – is the most ape-ful of the series.

That is to say, it’s entirely told from the point of view of the simians who inherited the planet after a virus either killed all the humans or rendered them speechless, mute and apparently unintelligent.

Noa (Owen Teague) starts to get the hang of eagle-ry in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

What it isn’t is the full-out action film that the trailer suggests. And what violence there is, is ape-on-ape. We don’t even see any humans in the first act, and they exist mainly as a MacGuffin. One megalomaniacal ape with a gorilla army who’s dubbed himself Proximus Caesar (voiced and motion-captured by Canadian Kevin Durand), has figured out that these dumb human brutes were once smart enough to design literally killer technology. And he’s built an ape city around a military vault that remains frustratingly unopened.

Proximus is, as you might have gathered, the villain in this piece. Gorillas, it’s always the gorillas. (Meanwhile, back here, on the Planet of the Humans, gorillas are pretty peaceful, but chimps can be psychotic. You don’t see many stories about gorillas ripping somebody’s face off.)

Set 300 years after the events in 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom begins in a peaceful Avatar-like ape village in the hills, where Noa (Owen Teague) is the best climber by far, but considers himself a failure because he hasn’t tamed eagles to hunt like his father Koro (Neil Sandilands).

Peace always being a temporary state, Noa’s chimp village is eventually attacked and sacked by Proximus’s troops, its denizens captured, and Noa on the run.

Ape social interaction, hierarchy and war is an interesting approach for director Wes Ball and writer Josh Friedman. But it’s a stretch over the nearly two-and-a-half hour run of film. Consequently, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes turns of tone to fill the time, including the introduction of a human collaborator (William H. Macy) who serves almost no purpose to the plot.

It begins as a bit of a road movie (minus the road), as Noa encounters Raka (Peter Macon), a wise orangutan who also escaped the raid, and who is the keeper of human books and the words of the legendary Caesar (Andy Serkis in the previous three films).

The two begin a quest to find their captured kind, and run across a human who – wait for it – can talk! Mae (Freya Allan), claims to know what’s what in Proximus’s ape city (with some secrets she keeps to herself), and so they were three.

In a way, this is the most interesting part of Kingdom, when we encounter bits of information that are also a nod to the 1968 original (the X-shaped crucifixes, humans being hunted in the tall grass by apes on horseback). Later exposition and a rushed, and in parts ridiculous, ending takes over.

In one way or another, every Planet of the Apes movie except the first has been a part of a longer narrative towards how this planet went ape. And for much of the screen-time, it does look like Kingdom is moving us there.

But, of course, it stops short. If Earth is ever fully simian-run in this series, we’ll be back where we started. And Charlton Heston isn’t around to straighten out those damned dirty apes.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Directed by Wes Ball, written by Josh Friedman. Starring Owen Teague, Freya Allan and Kevin Durand. In theatres May 10.