Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024, Ball)

Spoilers below

I'll never forget the feeling of total overwhelming awe that crashed into me upon the conclusion of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the feeling I chase with just about every movie I ever watch and rarely experience. It wasn't just me, either: every single person in the auditorium at the movie theater in my tiny Michigan hometown sat rapt and salivating for more. Strangers turned to each other as the credits rolled, wondering what we had just seen and when the next one would arrive.

We saw a great Hollywood movie. It was so great, in fact, that it served as inspiration for my first ever essay.^[1] I of course returned to world of Apes in 2017 to finish out the trilogy with War, which at the time I enjoyed yet felt didn't quite match the highs of Dawn. I ought to revisit it.

All said, I came into Kingdom with a fair amount of goodwill, if not a small amount of cynicism earned by the passing of time and the continued corrosion of the blockbuster format. It's fair to say, then, that Kingdom perfectly matched my expectations: a galvanizing entertainment generating much of its force from the memory of how improbably good the reboot trilogy was by, ahem, aping what is best about it. Big emotionality, nimble action, a grand sense of scale, and a passion for apocalyptic imagery.^[2]

Lest we ignore the film's ignoble pleasures: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes can be really fucking funny. It trips over its own portent at times, but more the better: I giggled at the histrionic deaths and overwrought speeches. If Caesar is to be ape Jesus, and his trilogy of films the Holy Gospel, then we can call Kingdom and its inevitable sequels the Acts and Epistles of the Apes series, i.e., noteworthy but insignificant when seen through the dwarfing lens of the Gospel of Caesar. Mix and match significant ancient figures and swirl them in a bowl and you get something akin to what ideas the reboot Apes series is playing around with now.

But there's one way the reboot's reboot can distinguish itself from the original reboot trilogy. A Revelation, if you will: apes in space. Sounds outlandish, but Ball teases it by having Noa glance into a gigantic telescope and not showing us what he sees. Trillion dollar idea for you, 20th Century, free for the taking. If the primary fixation here is on law and technology--more specifically the failure of law and the promise of technology--then an outerspace expedition only seems natural.

Kingdom has one glaring Achille's heel, however: actress Freya Allan, who is an absolute black hole as Mae, perhaps the most anti-charismatic casting since Lucas Black in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. It's not a human thing, per se, since William H. Macy's Trevathan is a Machiavellian delight.

Alas, the work continues.