Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

 

I recently complete a podcast covering the rebooted series of  three "Planet of the Apes" movies, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes", and "War for the Planet of the Apes". These movies took a concept from the original film series and brought it up to speed with the world that we now live in. The most clever element in the series was the explanation of why humans declined and apes rose. It had less to do with apocalyptic war and everything to do with cataclysmic viral pandemics. Pretty prescient if you ask me. This new film tries to bridge the gap a little by tying in a human underground effort to restore humanity to it's place on the planet, while also confronting the ambitions of a striving ape king who has corrupted the beliefs of the hero of the preceding films. So this movie has set up a pretty tough task for itself. I would say it succeeds for the most part, but not with the clarity of those three films.

Hundreds of years have passed since the events of the three reboots. Ape society is largely at a bronze age stage when it comes to technology, and a tribal stage when it comes to culture. Noa, the protagonist of this story, is a young ape on the brink of adulthood, who is carrying on the traditions of his clan. This group of chimpanzees has created a symbiotic relationship with eagles. They assist in expanding the population of eagles by nurturing excess eggs from eagles nests. It is an interesting culture. Many audience members may chafe at the detail that goes in to setting up the clan and it's traditions, but the world building here is essential to contrast the society we are introduced to with the one that invades it as the story goes on. 

Eventually, Noa must engage in a quest to restore the clan to it's home, and simultaneously navigate a dangerous path between aggressive gorilla traditions and unique human contacts. On his travels he encounters an orangutang named Raka, who knows history better than anything else going on in the world. This is a character that I think most of us will have the greatest sympathy for. Raka becomes a mentor on social groups and political issue, almost by accident. It is his tutelage that allows Noa, to make key choices late in the story. Some of those choices pay off, others seem to be setting up a new trilogy of films to tell about what happens in the middle ages of the ape saga. 

The technology in making the films gets better every time out. The characters look more realistic and their behaviors seem more natural by the fourth time we are encountering this story device. The film seems a little long, but I am not sure that there is any element of story that needs trimming, mostly I think brief cuts to many scenes would have tightened thing up a bit.  Kevin Durand, who was in "Abigail" the last film I saw before this, plays the CGI King Proximus Caesar. His outsized motion capture performance is one of the strong points of the movie. All of the actors deserve credit for making us believe that these animals are real characters. 

This is positioned as a Summer film, and it should fulfill those expectations, although I don't know that it will be able to stand out from many of the other movies that are coming in the next few week. The ethical questions raised by some moments of the film, in particular those from William H. Macy, are important, but I don't think the storytelling is quite as strong as it was on those sorts of points in the earlier movies. I think you will be more entertained than enlightened, but there is promise in this type of branching out of the story. I hope future episodes pay off a little more deeply. 

Abigail (2024)

 

This is a movie that would have worked so much better if the premise had not been given away in all of the advertising and the trailer. What starts off as a tense kidnapping story, takes a turn a quarter of the way into the movie, and it's a very clever twist. The problem is that we all knew it was coming, which undermines a lot of the stuff they get set up at the start of the film. That said, there is still fun to be had here because when it hits the fan, there's a glorious amount of Gore, violence, and ironic comedy.

Basically this is a variation of 100 other horror stories over the years. 10 Little Indians, Alien, The House on Haunted Hill, and dozens of other movies where a group of people are trapped in a situation where they will be picked off one at a time. Will they be able to figure out a solution? Will the antagonist reveal a motive? Is there any point to the story? The answers to these and other questions will come if you stay to the end of the movie. As in a lot of contemporary films, the people involved are not particularly pleasant, and we may very well feel that as things go along that some of them are getting what they deserved. Let's face it, everybody in this house was there because they were kidnapping a little girl. Maybe some of them are worse than others, and maybe there is possible redemption, but we're going to have to get a lot of dead bodies before we get to the point where we're glad that anybody is surviving.

Imagine if you were Claudia from the film "Interview with the Vampire", and you had to spend your eternal life as a child. What kinds of amusements could you come up with to keep you interested and at the same time allow you to continue your cover as an innocent child? Well that's basically what this film attempts to answer. The fact that the house it's full of booby traps, secret passages, and dark foreboding images adds to the fun. Characters betray one another and sometimes they actually support one another, but we're never sure of which outcome we're going to get before the events play out. This is where some of the fun comes in. This movie is not quite as engaging as "Ready or Not", the film from the directors that preceded this, but it's unlikely that you'll feel ripped off by watching it. Especially if you enjoy over the top monster action that results in blood splattered all over the screen on the set.

Actor Kevin Durant is a Canadian performer that I have seen in movies since the late 1990s. He's a big guy with a distinctive face and I've enjoyed most of his performances. This week, after not having seen him in films for several years because he was working regularly on on several television series, he turns up in two movies that I saw back to back. In "Abigail" he is the muscle on the team of kidnappers, and in "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes", he performs and voices the King,  Proximo. It's strange sometimes how little things line up and create interesting coincidences. He's actually very good in this film trying to be a sympathetic monster of a human when faced with a real life monster it's even more evil than he is.

It's true that in most survival stories, the participants are going to be faced with choices that they have to make which involve moral dilemmas. It's also true that we can probably pick out some of the characters who will not have any moral qualms about stabbing their fellow survivors in the back in order to be the ones who are still standing at the end of the story. We got a couple of those in this film, Complicated by some storytelling that is a little shaky. The resolutions come however they're kind of satisfying.

Don't be too panicked, the people who deserve to go will. Some people who don't deserve to die will. And logic will go out the window pretty quickly, actually just as fast as the windows are shut to close people into the house. Then all bets are off and you should just enjoy the bloody Mayhem.