The best part of the tenth Planet of the Apes is the dinner. Four attendees represent two unsteady alliances. Proximus (Kevin Durand) is the bonobo with the crown. His pet man Trevathan (William H. Macy) serves historical context. Kind chimpanzee Noa (Owen Teague) and mystery woman Mae (Freya Allen) are prisoners. Everyone has an agenda. The monarch wants to evolve his feudal realm with long-lost hardware. Mae’s plotting a similar comeback for her own race. Trevathan would like to not die. Noa just wants his family back, and doesn’t understand anything that’s happening.
Does Proximus pity the boy’s confusion? A month after its release, the thing I most remember from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the king’s teasing smile. He calls himself Caesar like the chimp of yore and the Romans of yesteryore. His cavalry worships him by seizing hostages to slave away on his shipwreck beach. Proximus – this is crucial – is awesome. Durand’s a genre legend, rugby-massive with a gargly tenor. Performance capture makes the big man bigger. He plays a barbarian conqueror planning high-tech disruption — a fantasy brute for the Silicon age. Villains trend dour lately, their bad intentions explained with wounded psyches. Sometimes evil is popular because it is fun.
Complaints I’ve heard about Kingdom: It’s long, silly, pointless. Noa’s boring. Allen’s one-note. Too much sequel set-up. The ending wrecks the Andy Serkis trilogy. When I recently went on Screen Drafts, the greatest podcast in the world, I was the only Guest G.M. who liked the newest Apes.
And I do dig Kingdom. Here’s a fresh look for an old idea: Verdant, youthful. Edenic greenscapes, not Matt Reeves’ shadow forests or Charlton Heston’s arid wastelands. Teague and Allen are teen-adjacent, half the age Roddy McDowall and Andy Serkis were at their Apes pinnacles. Allen’s blankness is well-deployed: She’s clearly plotting something. Teague makes Noa a sweet innocent among dark forces. Josh Friedman’s script approximates an ‘80s magic quest. Think The Last Unicorn, The Black Cauldron, Caravan of Courage: Misfit strangers crossing dangerous terrain toward the local demon. The Eagle Clan, Noa’s falconry-centric culture, feels very Neverending Story or Willow, half-pagan and half-dorky.
Those odd movies all depended on a vanished mood of PG horror: Adorable characters suffering terribly. Similar unease erupts when masked marauders destroy Noa’s village. Following them through forbidden lands, he runs into Mae. He assumes she’s another mute human moron, though it’s no shock to us when she speaks. They travel with Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan sage honoring Caesar’s tolerant message. He preaches to no choirs. Diplomacy is a harder sell than war.
Proximus is Raka’s antonym, a violent thug styling himself in Caesar’s image as a holy overlord. Because I believe the last couple Caesar sequels were thuggish, violent, and too religious, I consider this a sharp deconstruction. (Imagine if Kylo Ren declared himself heir to Luke instead of Vader.) Proximus and Raka twist one legacy opposite directions, which is what always happens to actual legacies. It’s pacifist monk versus crusader, Romney against the Trumpofascists. The orangutan exits before the bonobo arrives, a crucial narrative handover. On this hero’s journey, the hero is never the dominant personality.
Director Wes Ball previously made three Maze Runners. It’s an actual accomplishment that the best Maze Runner was the last Maze Runner. While the YA craze fizzled, the trilogy delivered ever-more-effective midbudget thrills. By The Death Cure, Ball was staging an awesome train-plane heist and a solid city-afire last act. He’s patient to a fault; Kingdom’s sequel should be shorter. But he pulls Apes in his own fantasy direction. Ball’s rodent-sword adaptation Mouse Guard was canceled, and he’s in line for The Legend of Zelda. I enjoy the Nintendo stratospheres Ball brings to his setpieces: skyscraper climbs, cliffside duels, a bridge bash, fatal waters rising.
Kingdom climaxes with Mae’s ambiguous betrayal. She blows up Proximus’ ambitions, leaving the whole chimp tribe in danger. Noa winds up victorious yet distrustful. While he rebuilds his village, Mae returns to her hidden faction. Her people survived the plague by burying themselves. With a critical device Mae found, they establish contact with other settlements. This ending whiffs a bit. Two deaths are left ambiguous enough for resurrections I don’t want. The tease is suitably bleak, though. Mae comes from a literal underworld hoping to make humanity great again.
When I started writing this essay series, I did not think Kingdom would be a success. Certainly, I never thought it would be May’s one non-calamity. Four weeks of disappointing Ryans, the Furiosa flame-out, and fucking Garfield left the theatrical experience endangered. Kingdom was a modest box office bright spot. It may get dusted by Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Godzilla X Kong was 2024’s higher-earning Ape IP. Those other projects are desperation maneuvers: Pixar and Illumination sequels, spinoffs united, beloved characters returning. Because Kingdom starts with Caesar’s funeral, it literally begins by setting its own most beloved character on fire.
The first Apes was a huge hit that could never be transformative as 1968’s other cosmic romp, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now Kingdom has none of the star power and half the gross of Dune: Part Two. It’s a minor star in Disney’s galaxy, leftover from dead Fox regimes. The thing about cockroaches is they survive. Audiences keep buying tickets for this concept. “There’s still an ape curled up inside of every man,” says the worst person says in the franchise’s best movie. “When we hate you,” he concludes, “We’re hating the dark side of ourselves.”
Planet of the Apes still scalds our worst vanities. It assumes you understand truths other sagas won’t touch: Our species is the problem, nobility isn’t enough, individuals are powerless, every peaceful community will become an angry mob, all civilizations will wind up ruined on some beach somewhere. Kingdom might seem light by comparison, but it doesn’t trust Noa’s clueless good intentions. By saving his family, he invites a doom greater than Proximus. The hero can’t even strike the final blow against the villain. The eagles do it.
Previous Planet of the Apes essays:
Planet of the Apes is anti-human from the beginning
Why can’t every sequel be like Beneath the Planet of the Apes?
Escape from the Planet of the Apes invents the franchise’s future in the past
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes burns it all down, again
Battle for the Planet of the Apes is only worth it for the orangutans
In Apes 2001, Tim Burton gets horny for the chimp
Who saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes coming?