Mark Twain once said that, “History does not repeat itself. It rhymes.” The Planet of the Apes series, now on its tenth installment, embodies this. The original 1968 Charlton Heston vehicle ended with his character Taylor in a state of despair at realizing the world of ‘damn dirty apes’ that he crash-landed on was the very Earth he had left 2010 years prior. The iconic final image is of the Statue of Liberty, once revered as a symbol of hope to immigrants, lying submerged in sand, a visual carcass of a once all-powerful kingdom. In Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the symbols of the American kingdom that once dominated the planet loom loud as ever-present monuments to a past lost. The rhyme of the franchise is that within its rebooted form, the existence of its prior entries are those monuments, a skeletal structure for the franchise to build upon and find new, exciting ways to parable the world that exists outside a cinema screen.
Many generations have passed since 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes. The Matt Reeves-directed epic that took Caesar (Andy Serkis), notably named for the infamous Roman general, on a mission to rescue his people set the stage for biblical connotations with Caesar’s death at the end. The death occurs after taking his people outside of human civilization onto a promised land. War presented him as a supplant for a religious savior, a Jesus-Moses hybrid where he leads his people to freedom and sacrifices himself in the process. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes on the task of showing how the message of one revered as a deity, one with wholly good intentions, can be corrupted in a world of hearsay and unreliable communication methods.
In Kingdom, the words of Caesar – “Apes. Together. Strong” – have been perverted by an ape, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). This ape, who has taken the name of Caesar to invoke the power of their ‘creator,’ has become a tyrannical dictator with the skewered desire to evolve, no matter how many apes he must sacrifice along the way or how many ape villages he must destroy. One such village is that of Noa’s (Owen Teague), a quiet settlement that rears eagles and smokes fish but one that is content with their settlement not impacting the larger world.
This review was first posted on May 13th 2024. Full review linked below.
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