Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 145 minutes
Release Date: May 10th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: 20th Century Studios / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Director(s): Wes Ball
Writer(s): Josh Friedman / Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (characters)

I’m the human NOT helping the apes.

Generations after Caesar sacrifices his life for the independence of his apes, we enter a village secluded from the overgrown cities on the other end of a derelict tunnel. Home to the Eagle Clan, Noa (Owen Teague), Soona (Lydia Peckham), and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) are off to climb for eagle eggs as part of a coming-of-age “bonding” ceremony wherein they learn to befriend and utilize the birds for the benefit of the community. The trio goes a bit out of their comfort zone to accomplish the feat and are celebrating on the journey home when they find what they believe to be an “echo.” While their elders decide to scare it off and preserve their isolation, however, another faction of apes seeks to capture it.

It’s the latter clan, led by Proximus (Kevin Durand), that first speaks Caesar’s name. The use is jarring because our assumption is that the peaceful Eagle Clan are his descendants. Familiarity (and a brief prologue) has us believing this initial stop in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is our connection to the previous trilogy—not a ruthless, mask-wearing battalion of violent killers. That’s why we need Raka (Peter Macon) to set things straight after Noa finds his brethren gone. It’s his search to bring them back that leads him to this elder historian whose mission is to preserve Caesar’s memory and place in the annals of their species. The real Caesar, not this king using his name to consolidate power.

Directed by Wes Ball (now that Matt Reeves has moved onto Batman) and written by Josh Friedman, this latest installment of the franchise appears to be flirting with full CG-animated territory a la Disney’s The Lion King with apes versus apes fireworks looming on the horizon. Raka will educate Noa, he’ll in turn educate his clan, and a battle will ensue between good and evil—rehashing the Caesar versus Koba argument, which itself rehashes the Professor X versus Magneto argument, which is surely based on countless other wars between compassionate co-existence and cutthroat domination. By the time we reach Proximus’s kingdom, the comparison point to “The Walking Dead” and Negan was my analogy.

And while Kingdom is that conflict at its core, there’s still the human in the room with which to contend. Because what Eagle Clan calls “echoes” are us—or the current version of us that hews much closer to the past version of us before evolution. If you don’t remember, the virus that ultimately gave Caesar and the apes their intelligence also wiped away the same from humanity. But, just like the initial wave of that disease only killed a majority of the population, its current iteration only stole the ability to talk from a majority of those who were left. That means some, like Mae (Freya Allan), the young woman Noa and his friends saw at the beginning, retained cognition. What’s more: they retained their history.

This is therefore a perfect film for the current climate’s misinformation, book burning, and full-scale assault on reality. Truth is our most dangerous weapon against tyranny and why the Republican party is so keen on erasing it from our collective memory. They want us to be like the Eagle Clan—docile, insular, uncurious—because that allows them to use us like Proximus for their own gain. Because he knows a bit about the truth (courtesy of William H. Macy’s Trevathan) himself. Enough to fear what happens if the humans acquire what he knows to be right beneath his feet first. The problem, though, is that he can’t know everything because he wasn’t there. And if apes don’t even remember their heroic Caesar, why would they know anything else?

So, we also can’t quite put our finger on what’s happening because generations have passed and we don’t know for sure what has survived beyond these apes. Maybe humanity is all but wiped out besides herds of “wild” wanderers and the ever sparse few with speech. Or maybe they’ve been waiting, building, and strengthening their numbers in the shadows. Is Proximus therefore wrong for wanting the power of guns and transportation lying in wait behind the vault door where he’s constructed his fort? Mankind is violent and opportunistic. They would try and destroy the apes the first chance they got. Does that fact mean the apes should lose their “humanity” to stop them, though? Is living under Proximus’s thumb any better than living in mankind’s cages?

These are questions Noa cannot afford to ask yet. Not when his loved ones are at risk. Maybe he doesn’t have to fully trust who Mae is and what she stands for, but he does need her help to survive, and vice versa. It’s an enemy of my enemy situation wherein hope in Raka’s lessons has us wondering if it might also be a “friends working together to create a brighter future of coexistence” situation. Kingdom is therefore the perfect upside-down bridge from its predecessors to what we assume from the ending will be at least one more subsequent chapter. This is the true circle of life wherein oppressed rebels inevitably become domineering oppressors … and back again. Because while cognition does breed empathy, fear-driven self-preservation always seems to win out.

That’s the beauty of these films, though. They allow us to see ourselves in the faction trying to live and the faction trying to ensure they can’t. That we really don’t know which is which is the point considering way too many of us can’t see it in real life either when the thought of actually seeing their party’s surrogate give a Nazi salute on live television would break their brain. And it’s easy to get confused when the visual effects work is this good. I didn’t need to know who Noa was because Owen Teague’s eyes were staring back at me. He and Durand are the only “apes” I knew going in and the filmmakers really did find a way to transform these actors rather than replace them. It’s impressive and ensures our ease with the relating to them as much as the humans.

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(L-R): Raka (played by Peter Macon), Noa (played by Owen Teague) , and Freya Allan as Nova in 20th Century Studios’ KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.