#37: KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

 

STARRING: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon and leading some gravity, William H. Macy. Written by Josh Friedman, directed by Wes Ball. Budget $165 million. Running time 145 minutes long.

And so begins the first film of the second trilogy of the reboot series of the 56 year-old Planet of the Apes franchise.

It's been seven years since the last one, War For the Planet of the Apes and 300 odd years have passed for ape-kind. Long gone the last remnants of intelligent humanity and the first talking ape, Caesar, who with his gang of semi-chatty intelligent apes took over the world. Now it's time for their descendants, lead by Chimpanzee Noa (Owen Teague) to pick up the metal fence poles of destiny and forge a new three-film arc on the mighty bones of their predecessors.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes marks the 10th film in a canon that started with the release of the 1968 Charlton Heston original. It starts quietly and takes time to get up and running as we follow three young apes, lead by Noa (Owen Teague) as they go Golden Eagle egg hunting, it turns out these apes are part of a clan that rear Eagles, just like great apes do in the wild. 

Anyway, it's not long before another band of apes, this time on horseback, attack Noa's peaceful, Eagle egg raising tribe, capturing everyone except for Noa and his dad, the tribe's leader, whom the bad apes kill. This in turns triggers Noa to set off on a quest to rescue his mum and the rest of the clan. Along the way he meets and teams up with mysterious human, Nova (Freya Allan) and a wise-old orangutan called Raka (Peter Macon). Anyway, it's not long before the bad apes catch up with them, it turns out they're after Nova, and they're all taken to the coastal kingdom of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) a bonobo ape with dreams of breaking into an ancient human bunker built on the beach and unlocking the secrets within.

And that's as much of the plot as I'm going to reveal. 

This is a fantastically good looking film the CGI effects are superb and the realism is off the chart, so much so, that at times I had a hard time working out which of the chimps was which. The motion-capture acting is great, the soundtrack is terrific and I can't fault the action. So it's a shame I didn't like this film more, I think the trouble is that the plot is very clunky, it doesn't flow well, things just happen to propel the plot and are delivered in a very ham-fisted way, for example the attack on Noa's village that results in the death of the one person who will motivate our hero to go on his quest, or the first meeting of Noa and Raka, or our hero getting knocked out conveniently at several times during the plot, or the disappearance of all the tribe's young at key moments in the story. Or his dead father's eagle that at the beginning of the film hates Noa. Plus there's some telegraphing of plot points and beats that annoy, none more so than the building of a seawall around the entrance of the human bunker to keep the ocean at bay, what the actual what?

The trouble is that whereas in the first three films the story of the apes and in particular Caesar was the focus, in this Nova becomes the main protagonist and her story just isn't as interesting. Similarly, Proximus Caesar is only there to give the film its villain, in previous films the villain, be it Gary Oldman's Dreyfus or Woody Harrelson's Colonel McCullough, brought real depth and drama to their roles, in this Proximus is just a crazy, rather stupid thug with a megalomanic complex. The ending of this sets up the obvious next story, but this is no cliffhanger moment and rather than elicit excitement there's just a sense of oh.

Everything just happens to propel the plot and there are some irritating plot holes, or plot contrivances that niggle. The first three films of this 'reboot era', Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes were exceptionally good films and raised the bar substantially, so this one has a lot to prove and perhaps that's the problem. Moving the story on 300 years is a good idea but there are ideas and elements I wish had been more explored, certainly in the trailer there's a sense of the Apes discovering mankind's history which is mostly brushed over in this. Sure there are some deeply touching moments, the telescope for one, the finding of the books in the library, but I wanted more of that sort of thing and perhaps less of an antagonist you knew would be dead by the end. 

All that said, it's great to see another more adult science fiction film, like Dune, something that's not filled with superheroes, robots, or spaceships, something with more depth and scope and this is not a terrible film by any stretch, it's just not as good as I wanted it be. That said it was still an enjoyable experience.

7/10