Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes brings nothing to the table
Ten years ago, writer Drew McWeeny posed a question in the headline of his latest column: “Has life in the age of casual magic made moviegoers numb to the amazing?” Frustrated by news of what would be 2016’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which he considered an unnecessary sequel to a film everyone saw and no one really loved, McWeeny revisited the film’s predecessor, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. He concluded that it was both a terrible movie and a technical marvel. McWeeny’s column articulated an existential crisis in both moviemaking and moviegoing: In a cinematic world without limits, the combination of extraordinary technical innovation and the lack of narrative ambition to match was making moviegoers numb.
Few recent films bring McWeeny’s words to mind more than Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Wes Ball’s stand-alone follow-up to the rebooted franchise that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Unlike the preceding trilogy, Kingdom is almost entirely an ape story. Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee from a secluded clan of eagle-raising hunters, seeks to free his people from the clutches of the warlord Proximus (Kevin Durand). Proximus wants to turn a world of disparate ape clans into a kingdom under his rule. The human Mae (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) — who can talk, hundreds of years after a human-made virus robbed most people of their intellects and voices — is caught between them.
As a story, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes rarely reaches above narrative competence. But because of its almost single-minded focus on the apes, its technical prowess in their rendering is always front and center. It is frankly incredible what the team at Wētā FX has done in conjunction with all of the film’s other effects artists to bring the apes to life, to give them all distinct body language, and to faithfully transpose actors’ every tic and subtle expression onto their faces. These are some of the most soulful digital creations ever seen in a
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