Civilisation has crumbled, culture has been lost, and humans have been reduced to feral, slow-witted creatures who can no longer form intelligible words. What better place to film it all than Australia?
Shot at Disney Studios in Sydney and on location in the wilds of New South Wales, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sequel to the 2011–2017 simian trilogy, set many generations after the reign of the legendary chimpan-A, Caesar (Andy Serkis, taking a well-deserved break from this latest instalment).
Earth is now overrun with apes who've formed themselves into regional clans. Primitive villages — not unlike those of the original 1968 movie — have sprung up across the land. The ruins of human cities, meanwhile, have been largely reclaimed by nature, their history and technology now a distant memory to all but the oldest apes — keepers of a secret knowledge that could threaten the newly dominant species.
What humans remain have been driven into hiding, mute scavengers left to scrape by in the shadows. The apes call them — in a neat, poetic touch — "the echo."
It's not exactly a utopia. The movie's new chimp hero, Noa (Owen Teague), is spurred into action when his peaceful village is burned to the ground by a band of gorilla-led marauders, who murder his father and take the rest of his family captive.
Dressed in spooky masks and wielding cattle-prods, these guys don't monkey around: they're foot soldiers of the fearsome Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a power-hungry chimpanzee hell-bent on consolidating the clans, ruling the planet and exterminating the remaining traces of humankind.
So begins a quest for revenge, with Noa roaming the forests and teaming up with the wise orangutan Raka (Peter Macon, giving the film's warmest, funniest performance), an ancient keeper of lore who yearns for peace between humans and apes — and bemoans the murders done in Caesar's name.
Also tagging along is a stray human girl (Freya Allan, of TV's The Witcher), who appears to be thoroughly feral — or at least smells as such, much to Noa and Raka's amusing displeasure.
"We shall call her Nova," says Raka. "We call them all Nova. I do not know why."
It's one of the few moments of genuine levity in this grim, rather earnest movie — spontaneity being hard to come by in a $165-million blockbuster whose motion-capture precision means scenes are mapped out months in advance of the shoot. (As always, Weta FX's mo-cap work here is exquisite, though the absence of Serkis — and his robust, energising performance — is a hole the new movie struggles to fill.)
Despite some pretty anonymous direction by Wes Ball (The Maze Runner trilogy), Kingdom does rouse itself in its gladiatorial final third, when our heroes are captured and delivered to the stronghold of Proximus — a shipwreck in which the great ape has enslaved his kin in a desperate bit to unlock a hidden fortress of human technology. (William H. Macy is also there, for some reason, as a human who's sold his services to the apes; I hope he had a nice holiday.)
His methods might be lousy, but you can't exactly fault Proximus on his ambitions, given the memory of humanity's cruelty. What they eventually uncover won't do too much to sway his conviction.
Still, these revelations are snoozers for a series that began with pop cinema's greatest-ever twist ending, one whose tangled mythology forced its filmmakers into ever-greater quantum leaps of loopy invention: blowing up the planet; sending ape-astronauts back through time; having humanity accelerate its own demise by enslaving the descendants of those time travellers.
Those early films also pulled no punches in painting mankind as the monsters — and made sure they got what the deserved, in often hilariously bleak ways.
By comparison, this newer series has crawled along a more familiar, linear trajectory — four movies in and they've inched to a place the audience is already many steps ahead of — while the original films' brutal analogies for man's cruelty have been replaced by a more standard hero's journey.
Realism, too, has robbed the series of its strange delight; there's something infinitely more pleasurable about seeing hammy actors in ape costumes — it somehow enhanced the sense of play, of the uncanny.
One of the issues seems to be that Kingdom, like its predecessors, can't seem to let go of its sympathy for humanity — despite all the evidence of its hubris — resulting in yet another movie that tries to play both sides, to cultivate a hope for co-existence that feels disingenuous to the series.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has its moments, but its insistence on playing things down the middle feels like a betrayal of the series' bitter, satirical origins.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is showing in cinemas now.
