A Stellar Franchise Continues Its Reign in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Long have we loved the apes. At least since Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a 2011 reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise that is thoughtful and chilling, carefully balancing dread and awe. That sweeping sci-fi was improved upon in the marvelous Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a Shakespearean tragedy housed within a bracing action movie. War for the Planet of the Apes, from 2017, is also terrific, smaller in scope but nonetheless gripping. The apes have done well by us in the last 13 years, standing solid while so much other franchisery has quaked and collapsed.

We’re zoomed forward in time—by “many generations,” as a title card explains—for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters May 10), a somber epic that mulls over prejudice and religion in its sprawling two-and-a-half-hour run. Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom doesn’t reach the rattling grandeur of Dawn. But it’s another worthy installment in a series that is pretty much unparalleled in contemporary times.

What’s happened over those many generations is that the human world has gone near entirely to seed, bringing things to, essentially, where Charlton Heston found them in the original 1968 film. Skyscrapers are now strange monoliths covered in flora. The notion that homo sapientes, reduced to scavenging herds, were ever a sentient alpha species has become mere legend.

And the apes, living in a kind of pre-industrial era, have lost common purpose as they’ve evolved. Kingdom primarily concerns an adolescent chimpanzee named Noa (the remarkable Owen Teague), the son of the leader of a clan of apes who commune with eagles and live, essentially, as an indigenous American tribe might have before Europeans came to annihilate them.

This eagle clan is aware of humans, but they view the few they’ve interacted with as pesky and feral nuisances. The apes are barely cognizant of the great struggle depicted in the previous three films, in which an ape named Caesar achieved sentience and led a campaign of independence. Caesar is long dead but has, as Kingdom intriguingly lays out, become a sort of Christ figure, his name revered but also co-opted for wicked purposes. Another sect of apes, led by a formidable bonobo, Proximus (Kevin Durand, giving good classical villainy), invokes Caesar’s name in a quest to find a lost trove of human resources: namely, the technology and weapons he suspects lie hidden in a last-ditch bunker on the California coast.

How Noa and Proximus’s existences come to clash is the great adventure of Kingdom, a film that insightfully explores the possibilities set up by the stories that have come before it. The Apes films have always been deft at handling conflicting loyalties; Kingdom advances that ambivalence in startling ways. We root for Noa, so sensitively played by Teague; we also want the best for Nova (Freya Allan), a human who makes an uneasy alliance with the film’s kinder apes.

What Kingdom keenly argues is that both heroes are ultimately at cross-purposes. The potential for a future in which apes and humans live in enlightened harmony is not wholly denied, but Kingdom grimly suggests that the autonomy of one group is most likely achieved at the expense of the other. That quandary is perhaps frighteningly relevant to our own reality, in ways both subtle and obvious.

This modern Apes franchise has never had anything good to say about the way intelligent creatures organize themselves. We are inexorably drawn toward the violence of asserted dominance; we create awful things. What Kingdom offers, however briefly, is the hope that at least one contingent of apes might eschew the worst of innovation, that they might duck away from the arc of history as it streaks past them. But the film also seems to understand that that is largely a fantasy. Of course these forces will come to bear on that more enlightened faction, whether or not they take up hideous means themselves.

This is either cynical or realistic, depending on your worldview. Either way, the film leavens its dark sentiment with a deep and enduring compassion. It’s there in the graceful performances, in the stirring and solemn visuals of a lush environment long free of burnt fuel and endless waste. That Kingdom re-invents the world only to point so damningly to its inevitable destruction is sad—its wonders are terribly fleeting. Yet they are still wonders. If we must be made to face our own worst tendencies, it is a small grace that they are guised in these miraculously realized digital creations, fake apes that fume and worry and grieve so convincingly. They protect us from the full glare of our corrupted nature—for the duration of the film, anyway.