'Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes': A Solid Addition To The Franchise... Even With Some Shortcomings

Hollywood can be frustrating with how they love nothing more than rewarding the same franchises over and over. Star Wars, Marvel, Harry Potter, Batman. Again and again and again.

But having said that…

If they put any words in front of "The Planet of the Apes" — "Rise of," "Dawn of," or "War for" — I will be there on opening night.

And so, last night, I had my butt in a seat for the 7:30 showing of the latest installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Apes are my favorite animals. I’ve been known to post up at the gorilla or gibbon exhibits with a brewski and just watch them do ape things (which is like 90% scratching themselves). 

I feel a kinship with them, perhaps due to my disproportionately long arms that make finding properly fitting dress shirts damn near impossible.

I love every movie in the Apes series that wasn’t directed by Tim Burton (who made the Planet of the Apes its own planet, thus defeating the entire point of the original Pierre Boulle novel), and the most recent Andy Serkis-led Caesar trilogy was fantastic.

So, as soon as I saw Thursday night showing tickets available I bought one and was not disappointed.

A Very Brief Summation Of The Plot

(There may be spoilers beyond this point. Not major ones because I’m not a douche, but if you’re one of those butter-soft people who would consider me saying character names and broad strokes of the plot a spoiler, then maybe take a rain check until after you see it.)

Alrighty then, this new Apes flick is set "many generations" after the previous one, 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes. That's not specific, but it appears to be at least several hundred years after Caesar's death.

By this point, apes have splintered off into various clans, and this movie follows Noa, a young ape from a clan that specializes in taming eagles.

Through a series of events, Noa accidentally leads another clan of apes to the village which they destroy in the name of Caesar, and kill his old man in the process.

So, he sets out to find the rest of his clan and along the way meets an orangutan named Raka who tells him that those apes have bastardized Caesar's teachings and tells him the late ape uprising leader's true teachings. 

Together Noa and Raka also meet a human they call "Nova" (you can probably do the math on where the name came from), but they come to find out that Nova can talk and her real name is Mae.

Together they set out to find an ape settlement where Noa's clan is being kept which is ruled by a chimpanzee named Proxiumus Caesar who has a pretty clear fascination with the Roman Empire (like all dudes) and gets regular lessons from his human teacher Trevathan, played by William H. Macy.

At the settlement, Proximus Caesar's goal is to open a human-made vault, the contents of which he claims will grant apes instantaneous evolution.

Got that? Good.

Now <i>that's</i> what I call "gorilla marketing" (shut up, I know they're chimps; let me have this). (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

The Start Is A Bit Of A Slog, But It's Worth Getting Through

The biggest pitfall of this movie is its slow start.

It takes a lot of time to understand what it is we're seeing because there are hundreds of years worth of exposition that need explaining. Screenwriter Josh Friedman did a good job of this, but there's just so much that it takes a lot of time before you fully understand how ape society works at this point in time and you have to pick up on some of the ape vernacular.

But it's all done in a way that feels believable, and I don't feel like you need to have recently watched the previous three films (I hadn't) before seeing this film to get what's happening.

In fact, I think you could go into this without having seen the previous trilogy and still get what's happening.

Once we get through that, the action sequences, set pieces, and characters themselves are pretty jaw-dropping. I think that the visuals alone make this a pretty great movie. Proximus Caesar's settlement, for instance — which looks like it's made out of rusting container ships — is really something to see.

There are also some references to previous films including the 1968 original, but they're pretty subtle and tasteful. I hate when franchise movies like this hammer you over the head with references to previous films, so dummies go, "Hey! That's the thing from the other movie I saw before this one!"

I feel like the subtler, the better, and director Wes Ball nailed this. There's a scene in this movie that uses an iconic set piece from the 1968 movie and a couple of notes from the original score that legitimately gave me chills.

But I'm a dork…

<i>Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes </i>— like so many of the films in the franchise — can't seem to give us an ending as memorable as the one in the original <i>Planet of the Apes </i>from 1968. (Photo by Screen Archives/Getty Images)

My One Complaint…

My one criticism of this (and frankly all of the more recent Apes movies) is that you can kind of see everything coming before it happens. It's all pretty predictable. 

If you're familiar with Chekhov's Gun — the narrative principle that if something is introduced into the story it has to play a role later on — this movie is full of examples.

Which is fine, but it's a bit of a shame considering that the first three films in the original series — Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and Escape from the Planet of the Apes – all had twist endings to various, with the first one having what some (*raises hand*) is the best twist ending in movie history, which was cooked up by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, the man behind the first draft of the script.

(Quick aside: his draft — aside from the ending —was scrapped because it was very close to the original novel which has the Apes living in a 1950s or 1960s city with cars and skyscrapers. That was deemed too expensive to produce so they went with the more primitive look we all know, but kept Serling's genius ending). 

I'm not saying go dull M. Night and do something goofy for the sake of a twist, but I like those bleak surprise endings from the late ‘60s and into the ’70s like the one in the original Planet of the Apes that you just don't see coming.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking it out if you love any of the previous movies (even the Tim Burton one; which was on cable just this morning so I flipped it on, and it's as rough as I remember).

I'm giving Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, four damn dirty ape paws out of five.

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Plan on seeing Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes? Already did? Do the apes creep you out? Send me your thoughts!: mattreigleoutkick@gmail.com