NUTS4R2: Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

My Kingdom
For An Ape

Kingdom Of The
Planet Of The Apes
Directed by Wes Ball
USA 2024
20th Century Fox
UK Theatrical Print

Well I certainly wasn’t expecting Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes to be any good. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the previous trilogy and pretty much most of the original movies (I even liked the Tim Burton version to some extent) but after War Of The Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) I couldn’t see where else they had left to go with it. Turns out I was wrong though... they did have a bunch of ideas worth exploring and I thought the new film was absolutely fabulous. Not sure why the critics are grumbling that it’s too slow, to be honest.

This one is set ‘many generations’ after the previous film, except for a brief prologue where you see Caeser’s funeral... about 300 years later, in fact. The hero of this one is a young, teenage ape named Noa who, although he’s played by Owen Teague rather than Andy Sirkis this time around, does bear a striking resemblance to the lead ape of the last three movies. I think it’s the director’s visual shorthand to say that this new legacy hero is part of the same bloodline, without having to tackle that issue in this film (although, I suspect possibly in a future film it may come to light?).

In this one, Noa’s clan are all falconers and the film starts off with Noa and his two friends on an expedition to climb and steal three eagle eggs so they can attend the village bonding ritual the next day. After an accidental intervention by a seemingly bright human, played by Freya Allan and initially named Nova (after the human female in the original 1968 movie, reviewed here), Noa has to leave the village at night to try and get another one, or miss out for a year. But then he discovers a group of masked apes who are from another, much more aggressive clan, headed up by an ape called Proxima Caeser.

These apes slaughter some of the villagers, kill his father, enslave the rest of the villagers (taking them back to Caeser’s own encampment) and then leave Noa for dead. When he awakes the next morning, he clearly has a mission to set his fellow clan members free so, for a while, the movie becomes a road movie with him, a knowledgable orangutan he finds on the way and, eventually, Nova... who turns out to really be called Mae.

Then things really start to happen and when they finally arrive at the ‘kingdom’ of Proxima Caeser, it’s clear he has a more sinister motive for his actions and is much more aware of what the humans were on the planet some 300 years or so before. He even has his own talking human, played by William H. Macy. But that’s as much as I want to give away here because, it’s definitely worth a look and has an ending that sets up the next two films. Although, while some critics don’t see it as a stand alone film at all, I’d disagree... the ultimate set up for the next one is really just established properly right at the end of the picture, in a series of epilogue sequences. I think it works just fine as a stand alone movie, for sure. But, yeah, I hope it does well because, I would like to see where they take the next chapter in the saga, after what happens at the end here. I can’t help but think that Mae will end up being the natural antagonist of the apes by the time of the third movie down the line.

And it’s wonderfully put together, looks nice, is well acted and has remarkable special effects again. I never find myself questioning the reality of the apes in these later films, for sure. And there are also a heck of a lot of nods to the original 1968 movie in this. And that also goes for the music too. While composer John Paesano starts the film off in a very similar musical landscape as Michael Giacchino’s score for the previous movie, as the visual echoes of the 1968 movie start to stack up, the composer goes into the same territory as Jerry Goldsmith, bringing his orchestrations and snatches of his compositions when the crucified ‘scarecrows’ are seen for instance. Or in a very similar scene to the hunt in the 1968 classic, actually having a do over of Goldsmith’s famous accompanying action cue. I don’t know if this was the original intention though because, well, I did also detect a bit of ‘temp trackitus’ in the film... because when Noa first enter’s Proxima Caeser’s kingdom, the music seems to exactly replicate a very specific part of Goldsmith’s score for The Mummy too so... not sure why that happened unless it was part of the musical temp track, I suspect.

However, it certainly doesn’t hurt the movie and I would love to listen to this score away from the movie. A shame then that Disney don’t seem to have issued it on a proper CD, once again giving us a first film in a franchise now owned by Disney to be the first in that franchise not to have an actual CD score release. It’s such a shame that this isn’t available on a proper format, for sure.

That being said, I think Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is a solidly put together film which, asides from the echoes and retreads, does have some nice ideas and which I think lovers of the franchise will want to jump in and explore alongside with the director and writers. I’ll definitely be revisiting this one again when it comes out on Blu Ray.