By Jake Wilson
KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES ★★
(M) 145 minutes
Whatever might be said against Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, there’s no lack of apes. There are dozens if not hundreds of them, chimps, gorilla, the occasional bonobo, played largely by human actors in motion capture suits, mounted on horseback or bounding on all fours across a far-future landscape closely resembling the bush of NSW, where this Hollywood production was shot.
Noa (Owen Teague), Nova (Freya Allan) and Raka (Peter Macon) confront a new world in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
Yes, there are eucalypts in California as well, but Australian viewers won’t be fooled. Where the action is supposed to be taking place remains an enigma, compounded by the herd of zebras who wander by. Perhaps their ancestors escaped from a zoo.
Directed by Wes Ball (The Maze Runner), this is the first instalment in this franchise since War For the Planet of the Apes in 2017 (there have been 10 films in all, going back to the 1968 original). A few centuries or millennia hence, the apes are the unquestioned rulers of earth, with few indications human society ever existed, beyond the occasional disused railway tunnel or ruined skyscraper overgrown with vines.
While a couple of human characters do eventually show up, the primary drama is strictly ape versus ape, with youthful chimp hero Noa (Owen Teague) pitted against bonobo villain Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) and his gorilla army, who lay waste to the peaceful valley where Noa lives with his tribe. So he sets forth into the wider world, where he’ll be faced with some surprising truths about his species’ past.
Like the setting, the hints of allegory are kept vague, which is just as well. Certainly, it would be appallingly offensive to equate the apes with any particular race or ethnic group (some of the earlier films in the series were less careful on this front, as the comic Dave Chappelle noted long ago).
That leaves it up to us to decide what we make of the vocal performances, which hark back to old-school Hollywood stereotypes of “uncivilised” peoples: the ape manner of speech is formal yet halting, as if the English language didn’t fit easily in the characters’ mouths. Even the learned orangutan Raka (Peter Macon) shows signs of this tendency, for instance when he sees those zebras: “Horses with … stripes. Quite … striking.”
Plainly, this is not a movie to be taken too seriously, but at nearly two-and-a-half hours, it’s also much too slow and ponderous to qualify as a campy good time. Mostly, it works best when Ball focuses on the apes in motion, swinging between branches or scampering up cliffs – some of these sequences look as though they might work well in 3D.
But if the pleasure of watching animals in action is what you’re seeking, this largely computer-generated spectacle is no match for what’s on offer in nature documentaries or at the zoo. It might take a monkey a while to type the works of Shakespeare, but stick a bunch of chimps in front of a camera for two hours and I guarantee their antics will be more entertaining than this.
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is released in cinemas on May 9.
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