Bored by ‘Apes’: ’Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ is the worst of the new series

Some good ideas eventually come to the fore, but the action is weak, and ‘Kingdom’ takes a very long time to get going

To give you an idea of how long the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise has been around, the first movie starred James Franco. 

That was 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which over the last 13 years has been followed by Dawn Of… War For… and now Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. I admired these films to some degree, especially Andy Serkis’ motion-capture work as the pivotal ape Caesar. However, I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve seldom remembered anything about the previous films by the time the next new one rolled around. 

Now, the Apes franchise is back, with Caesar and Serkis out of the picture (that ape died at the end of the last movie, in what was either one biblical allegory or possibly a different one.) There’s also a new director, with Wes Ball from the Maze Runner trilogy stepping in for Matt Reeves. 

The new film is mostly a disappointment. The first hour is deathly dull, while the action sequences are notably weak, with the camera swinging everywhere and little visual coherence. Filming fight scenes that way is bad enough when it’s humans, but if it’s two apes, forget it. 

Eventually, some exciting ideas surface, but it’s too late. 

It’s been seven years since War for the Planet of the Apes, and Kingdom offers a time jump of hundreds of years, meaning all new characters. The series has featured the slow rise of apes and the decline of humans, and by the time of the new film, the inversion is essentially complete. 

Now, the apes can speak in complete sentences! But despite that, the humans are plotting a comeback. 

The new hero is Noa (Owen Teague), who is introduced as part of a clan of apes. He soon engages in a Hero’s Journey that introduces him to a less feral human than most (Freya Allan), and eventually in opposition to an evil ape warlord named Proximus Caesar (voiced by Kevin Durand.) It all leads to a Marvel-style action climax, except even more incoherent. 

The film does introduce some good ideas. The best of them involves a character played by William H. Macy, who collaborates with the ape villains. Proximus Caesar is a particularly compelling villain who twists the lessons of the original Caesar for warlike purposes. 

But it’s all too little, too late. And perhaps unsurprisingly, there is supposedly going to be another new trilogy. There were five movies in the original 1960s and ‘70s series; let’s not talk about that unfortunate Tim Burton/Mark Wahlberg version from 2001. 

(Note: I was trying to place the actress Freya Allan, who plays the significant human role. She strongly resembles Rachael Leigh Cook- could she be her daughter? But then I realized Allan was on The Witcher, and I interviewed her in person in 2019.)