The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place centuries after the events of Caesar, there is a new protagonist grappling with eternal problems. And humans are not completely extinct. Our review of Wes Ball’s soft reboot.
The monkey Noa (Owen Teague) lives with his tribe, in a world that after centuries has a vague memory of who he once was Caesarat the dawn of the Earth dominated by primates. However, he is forced to face this myth when the dictator monkey Proximus (Kevin Durand) claims to embody it, starting to enslave other tribes. Spurred on by a wise orangutan, Raka (Peter Macon), creates a complicity with one of the surviving humans in herds in the wild, But it is (Freya Allan). However, remaining in balance between the two worlds was difficult for Cesare… and it won’t be easier for Noa.
Matt Reeves he ended his on a very high note The War – Planet of the Apes in 2017, due to critical and public appreciation that could not leave this historical saga dormant. Between that movie and this soft reboot The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes seven years pass in reality, the time necessary to process the procedures for the Disneynew owner of the Fox assets since 2019, and plan a continuation, this time entrusted to Wes Ball: the director knows about dystopian storieshaving already transposed the Maze Runner trilogy. These years have also allowed the WETA Digital to further practice with the technique of performance capturewhich can now serve as a story in which human beings are completely marginalperhaps immanent from a narrative point of view, but not very present in the pure minutes: The Kingdom is in fact an animated film that travels parallel to a real shotwhere the fusion between real elements and digital synthesis of the environments and characters is so subtle that it is not even perceived as “special effect“. It may also be that the finish line no longer surprises anyone, but the very fact that we are there get used to this exceptional normality it is a point of honor for a saga that of this “illusion of reality“he lives and breathes (as he certainly couldn’t do in the days of Planet of the Apes of 1968!).
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes It’s not a surprising filmand lives on the black and dark strength of the previous trilogy, despite being slightly less dark: it is not as tense, but it is aadventure with all the right ingredientswhere we appreciate, more than the dynamics of the story, the attention to a fundamental aspect of the saga, since the prototype with Charlton Heston (mentioned here in a scene hunting a pack of human beings). There representation of human beings in these films it has always served to groom consciences of the same audience, who is invited to alternate between identification with Noa and that with Mae, finding themselves reflecting on the girl’s motivations: the element ethical-moralkept ambiguous in the script of Josh Friedman (already behind Foundation), works very well and helps to give a extra reading size to the classic blockbuster that restarts sagas, winks at “universe”, opens up to sequels and so on.
The limitation of a film like this, apart from the length of two hours and twenty minutes (which did not seem very necessary to us), we would however look for it precisely in a discourse external to the work itself. Not everyone finds this approach correct, because it can actually be a little unfair: some argue that you should only concentrate on what you have in front of you on the screen, for that duration. In recent years, however, the majors have accustomed us to reading their “cinematic universes” constantly thinking about the breath greater than a narrative superstructureso it’s hard not to judge entire projects along with the individual chapters. If the previous trilogy narrated the loss of power by humans and the rise of the apes as a dominant species, it seems clear that this new saga wants reverse the dynamics, which makes the mechanism a little… cold. It’s as if the audience is being asked to accept a “push-and-pull” which could take away the charm and necessity of the previous epic of Caesar. Certain discussions should be left closed to strengthen the messages, but perhaps the fans – in front of a film that is also pleasant – could disagree with this judgement.
