Whatever else may have gone right with the recent Planet of the Apes films, you couldn’t say the titles tripped off the tongue. Too much “of the” going on there. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a mouthful, then Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a linguistic atrocity. One longs to call it “Kingdom of the Apes”, but I suppose you need the brand up front.
At any rate, the film is, following a trilogy that looked to have ended with a satisfactory full stop, better than we had a right to expect. It’s more of a linear romp. It is almost a family film. Nothing wrong with that. For all the professionalism of the previous three flicks, none was striving for the spiritual resonance of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Seven years ago, War for the Planet of the Apes concluded with the sane contingent of the simian community in apparent ascendancy. We are invited to believe that centuries of civilisation stretch beyond the temporal horizon. On the other hand, naming the founding father “Caesar” surely offered a clue that future dark ages remained a possibility.
That’s not quite where we are here. As the action begins, several centuries after the previous film concluded, Noa (Owen Teague), a lively young chimp, is living in apparent harmony within a community that trains eagles to defend and hunt. It seems a decent sort of place, but technology is still rudimentary and literacy has not been achieved. Humans, for all we see of them, look to be in an even less sophisticated position. All these aeons after that mysterious virus annihilated Homo sapiens society, the chimps, as they did in the first ever Planet of the Apes film, regard their primate relations as simple-minded knuckle draggers with no prospect of civilised advancement.
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Then again, how can they tell? In the 56-year history of the film sequence, this is, by some margin, the most ape-centric of the episodes. We meet only two human characters, neither of whom is so focal as Charlton Heston once was. Freya Allan says little as a lone wanderer who, to much suspicion, joins our heroes on a march into the heart of darkness. William H Macy retains civilised graces as an intellectual toady of the messianic bad guy.
Long before we get there, the film indulges itself with a few gestures towards John Ford’s The Searchers. An attack by an unknown ape faction on the Eagle Clan leaves their dwellings smouldering and renders many dead. Noa and colleagues set off on a journey that ultimately brings them – via a shore that recalls the end of the 1968 movie – to a slave colony ruled by a mouthy, tyrannical gorilla named Proximus Caesar. The temptation to draw parallels between this ranting bore and contemporary “strong leaders” is close to irresistible, but all that (ahem) aping of previous Caesars reminds us we are also hearing the industry-standard vocabulary of 20th-century fascism.
The effects are now so familiar that, the stuff of witchcraft 30 years ago, they seem close to unremarkable. In more ways than one. During a film dominated by digital apes, one finds oneself savouring the fleshy human faces and gaping Australian location work. Happily, Wes Ball, director of the efficient Maze Runner films, knows how to keep his gripping story rattling along at a distracting pace. There may be few huge ideas here (something about how we misuse distant history, something else about the poisonous power of charisma), but the dedication to spilling out narrative pays dividends as we round on an open-ended, but intriguing, coda. The film is good enough to deserve the sequels towards which it there gestures.
