Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Review
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is finally here. This has been a movie that I have been very much looking forward to as it was my second most anticipated movie of the first six months this year. I loved the world that Andy Serkis, who played Caesar, and Matt Reeves, who directed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, created. Needless to say, I was looking forward to seeing how this world would be expanded.
300 years after the death of Caesar, a young ape named Noah goes on a journey that will make him question all that he has ever learned, and he will need to decide what is best for the relationship of apes and humans.
Starting off, this movie is long, and I mean really long. The 2 hour and 25 minute runtime does not make it feel any shorter. There is a lot of world building and exposition that needs to be done which does eat a large chunk of the runtime. With that, I thought the world building was done well. It’s quickly established that the apes are split into different clans and humans have become the inferior species. A little later, but still during the world building process of the movie, we learn that the main character from the first three movies from 2011-2017, Caesar, has been all but forgotten by these apes. Some still remember him and follow him like he is a god, some twist his words and what he has said, but some have never even been told about him.
Moving on from the new world, the action in this movie was mildly lackluster. It felt very predictable with who was going to win each fight when there was one, and this movie just did not have the same impact that any fight from the first three movies had. It always felt like there was a clear villain, which was Proximus, and there was always the clear good guy, Noah. Now, compare that to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We knew Caesar was the good guy and who we were supposed to be rooting for, but you can understand where Koba is coming from in that movie. Koba was a subject of constant testing, including testing on the virus that nearly wiped out the human race. He wanted revenge on the humans, while Caesar was raised by humans, so he wanted apes and humans to coexist. With the lack of morality or confliction, lots of this movie felt empty.
Onto the great parts about this movie: its visuals. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was shot almost entirely on location which is absolutely mind boggling to me. With a movie where nearly every action we see on screen is done via motion capture, it would make a lot more sense to shoot everything in a studio with green screen, but I am glad they didn’t. This movie’s visuals were out of this world. Since 2011, the Planet of the Apes franchise has done its best to be at the top of the game when it comes to VFX, which they’ve done. From what I can think of, it’s one of two major franchises, the other being Avatar, that uses either completely CGI environments and characters or nearly completely motion capture equipment. It is always great to see that there are still new ways to make things look more and more realistic.
There is a lot of significance in some things in this movie, specifically with the main character and his name. Noah is originally a Hebrew name, and I am sure many of you are familiar with the story of Noah and the ark he built when the earth was flooded. I thought it was very interesting to see the main character with this name because I feel that it is not often we see this name come up in pop culture. This Noah, similarly to the one in the Bible, has to build a new world from what is left. Noah in the movie has to think about what is best for apes, while also knowing there are still some intelligent humans left on the earth. Will Noah go down the path that Proximus paved and try to destroy humans and make apes the permanent, dominant species, or will Noah follow the path that Caesar took in trying to build a world for apes and humans?
Overall, this movie was a little bit of a letdown, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad movie. There are some bumps along the way, and I do believe they will get smoothed out as this story continues to unfold. I am looking forward to what happens next in this world of science fiction and to hopefully see the conflict that Noah will have in choosing ape and human, or just ape. With that, this movie gets a very solid 82.
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