Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Ball, 2024)

My click-bait reaction to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is that it is the Star Wars movie that I’ve been waiting for almost forty years.

The problem with such pull quotes is that absent some context they look hyperbolic and absurd. So what do I mean by that?

Just that franchise films do a poor job of integrating new characters and new stories into their franchise’s primary mythology. Everything is relevant only insofar as it sets up or follows from the master narrative. By contrast, television properties — I’m thinking of Game of Thrones here, but there are other examples — can introduce new characters or story arcs that would stand on their own even if the underlying franchise starter did not exist. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes would be an interesting and satisfying stand-alone movie even if the other films in the reboot franchise did not exist. I can’t say that about any Star Wars narrative (except possibly Endor) since The Empire Strikes Back.

The primary conflict in Kingdom is between different clans of apes. Humans exist, but this narrative explores a gap in the metanarrative of the original franchise, the time after apes take over but before Taylor and company come from the past. Since this iteration spins around a biological rather than nuclear cause, we don’t even know if a Taylor equivalent is ever coming. This franchise is finally free to move in its own direction, not forced to lead up to inevitable events that we already know must occur. Maybe it’s more accurate to think of this as a metaverse iteration rather than a reboot, because simply trying to change the predecessors (the route of The Terminator franchise) gradually reduces any mythic weight to the stories by undoing previous installments rather than building on them. This is advancing the new story, not shoehorning in new parts of the same old story.

And it’s all done in a rather interesting way. The time gap between Caesar’s death and this generation of primates is wide enough that parts of history that are known to the audience have been lost to the characters themselves. In fact, the differences between history and myth, questions about legacy and preserving it, are being addressed on multiple levels. It is rare that a franchise film builds in room for multiple perspectives on what might be the right way to respond to a situation, that it has thematic as well as narrative complexity.

In fact, the conflation of different histories and myths, some internal to the world itself, some tied to our world in ways we understand but the characters might not (names like Trevathan, Noa, Proximus, and Caesar all carry echoes of pasts that have been lost or forgotten) reminded me so much of Riddley Walker that I had to look up writer Josh Friedman to see if I was reading too much into it. When I was reminded that he was a co-creator and writer for Apple+’s Foundation, that clicked. The Asimov trilogy was a foundational (pun intended) example of a story told not through episodes in a single life, but across generations of lives. If this is where the Planet of the Apes franchise wants to go, it could be exciting and interesting and welcome to those of us growing weary on endless reiterations of the same basic story (MCU, Star Wars, James Bond). A large part of my enthusiasm for last year’s Mission: Impossible entry also revolved around attempts to break out of the established series narrative and try to let the characters and situation evolve.

So I’m hopeful for the future of the franchise, but…telling new stories is hard, even in an existing universe. You would think that having done world-building in a movie or two that franchises such as Star Wars or Aliens or the MCU would afford writers a better opportunity to tell creative and diverse stories. Instead, the opposite appears to be true. These are all the cinematic equivalents of pop songs, and while we lament the sameness of them, we, the audience, too often punish innovation. Something is comforting in the familiar. The more expensive movies are to make, the harder it is to blame studios for not wanting to take chances, even when movies, like this one, are more interesting and entertaining for having done so.