Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review
It’s hard to say exactly, but I feel like the ethos of the current culture is harder to define than ever before. Every decade since roughly the 1950s has had its own relatively distinct set of characteristics that certainly bled over into the art and popular culture of the time, including the 2010s, which in my opinion retrospectively had a lot more personality than was easily recognizable at the time. The 2020s, however, do not seem to share this quality, at least not in a way that can be romanticized like other decades could. Needless to say, 2020 starting with a pandemic had a large impact on the world’s creative output, but as we approach nearly the halfway mark of the decade, I still find myself wondering what movies will end up defining the spirit of the 2020s. Blockbuster movies have been in a particularly weird place the past few years, with countless sequels and remakes within big-name franchises flopping at box offices. How could this be? Maybe audiences have the dreaded blockbuster fatigue; maybe it costs too much to go to the movies; maybe the films simply aren’t that good anymore and even the most general audiences are noticing; or maybe it’s that the crops of blockbusters just somehow aren’t tapped into what the culture wants or needs. When a blockbuster comes along and does legitimately make a lot of noise across the board, it feels like kind of a big deal. People were super excited to see Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer, and more recently, Dune: Part Two had audiences going crazy in a way that is scarcely seen nowadays. Every few weeks, a movie that’s supposed to be a big deal comes and goes, making a small splash but ultimately hardly leaving the dent it was intended to. My point is, it seems like it’s more difficult than ever for movies to leave a lasting impact on contemporary culture. It’s hard to tell what the zeitgeist is even craving. Which is why I’m honestly completely baffled by the reception of the newest movie in the Planet of the Apes franchise, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. I don’t think this movie is breaking records for hype, but it’s probably going to be one of the biggest releases of this summer, and people are already going bananas about it. I have to admit that I’ve never really been a fan of this series or felt very interested in it. I watched the first one, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, sometime in middle school. It was okay but fairly forgettable to me. I never ended up watching Dawn or War despite how amazing they supposedly are because for whatever reason I just don’t find the whole monkeys vs. humans idea especially captivating. And so I went into this movie with low expectations and no real care for the series or what its fans would want. I just hoped for either a surprisingly well-done adventure movie with cool action scenes or a weird, balls-to-the-wall surrealistic extravaganza of the uncanny valley. The film turned out to fall flat on both ends of this spectrum.
I have no idea why people seem to be enjoying this as much as they are. I really do mean it when I say this is one of the most boring and confusing movies I’ve seen in quite some time. For a movie with a plot that should be able to be understood by very young audiences, it makes no sense that I wouldn’t be able to follow the story very well, but yet, this was the case. I suppose it’s possible that it all would have made more sense to me if I had seen the past two Apes films, but Kingdom is a departure from the established storyline and the start of a new trilogy with all new characters. The protagonist is a young monkey named Noa whose village of fellow apes becomes burned and ravaged by a rival group of apes. He spends the film traveling across the wide land of the ape world with the intent of reaching the place where the rival ape clan lives, where his clan is being kept hostage by a king ape. This is a film that barely bothers to explain its own plot. It simply moves the characters forward without providing solid explanations of what’s going on or why it’s going on. Maybe part of the issue is that the majority of the characters are monkeys who speak incredibly broken English, and thus their summaries of the situations at hand didn’t fully register. I just ended up lost, and at a certain point, I gave up trying to understand more than the most basic storyline.
If this movie had been about an hour shorter it could’ve entered so-bad-it’s-good territory, but its nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime turned it into an absolute slog to sit through. The dialogue, which could mostly have been written by little kids, and which is voice acted with aggressively thorough conviction and passion, is unintentionally hilarious, and I could not believe I was the only person in the theater laughing at the delivery of at least a good handful of the lines. I would love to see a script of this movie or footage of the voice actors in the studio; both would have me doubled over. They should’ve left out human characters completely and just let it be what it should’ve been – a knowingly ridiculous story that focuses on purely monkey business. Instead, we get a bland and forgettable human sidekick character whose motivations are confusing (she’s working with a group of monkeys whose goal is essentially to bring equality to monkeys, to fight against the larger monkey species because she wants humans to be as powerful as they once were), and also William H. Macy, for practically zero reason. Usually when people say, “Why were they in this?” about an actor in a movie, there’s at least some sort of plot-related explanation, but he is in this for absolutely no reason at all and does nothing for the story. Any opportunity for interesting human-to-human interaction between him and the girl is wasted.
Unfortunately, this movie is not especially entertaining, either. It takes itself far too seriously for a movie about talking apes and forgets to actually have fun with its subject matter. This is a film that attempts to be a truly dramatic journey, but many people will flock to see it for monkey action. I have no idea what the message of this movie was supposed to be, but of course they had to throw in some ham-fisted anti-human segment at the very end even though humans weren’t the antagonists of the movie at all. After a dreadfully long film where monkeys are fighting other monkeys, why is the monkey main character acting like this is all the human character’s fault? Get it together. This makes no sense, and if this is an allegory, then it falls flat. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes should’ve lived up to its title and been a cool movie about monkeys just completely wilding out, but that’s hardly what this is; instead, we get a confusing mess of a CGI dump (shoutout to the work the animators did, but watching a “live action” movie of almost entirely CGI feels lame to me) that couldn’t pace itself if its life depended on it. I don’t want to just bash this movie, but the only real appeal that I can see is laughing at it. It could’ve been flamboyantly stupid and awesome like Godzilla v Kong or something of that nature, but it’s simply too boring and self-serious for that.
It might be possible that the fact that audiences are so eager to watch this movie about monkeys fighting each other means something about where we are right now as a culture. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but this isn’t even a cool action picture; this is just a movie where apes make noises and jump around. Maybe all we need is to immerse ourselves in the world of the monkey and revel in a film composed mostly of genuine ooh-ooh ah-ah dialogue. Maybe everyone’s brain is too fried to not love this type of stuff, but I’m not impressed personally. This feels like a movie that would be made by literal monkeys, telling stories of their own culture and perspectives. Perhaps our enjoyment of this is a signal that we should all reject whatever the current culture is and return to monkey times because Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes feels like a movie made by monkeys for monkeys and everybody is just eating it up.
