Saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a fairly stirring film set in the Planet of the Apes universe. In case you're somehow unaware, the franchise was kicked off by a Twilight Zone-esque film showing a group of astronauts crash land on a planet ruled by apes where humans are unintelligent livestock animals. The big twist of the original film was that this is earth after all and that some calamity has occurred which wound us up in this upside-down world. The prequels (which this film is one of) then work to fill in that gap: how did we get from here to there?
The prequel films have been attempted twice: once in the 70s and now in the 2010s. They have a tricky central problem to solve: the apes are going up against long odds as they overcome humanity but we know, from the original, that they do it. How can we start the apes off as an underclass without making their eventual transition to the over-class very troubling? The original 70s films could not square this circle: they idiotically made the intelligent apes into analogues for black people (being shipped from Africa and employed as maids and all) implying that some kind of race war was coming where the "apes" would rise up and subjugate all us "humans". Unsurprisingly, the films struggled to cohere. The modern films have no such trouble. They draw from the Fallout series of games and from other post-apocalyptic stories. How will a sympathetic and well-meaning pluralistic society wind up subjugating one of its sub-sets? Why by arrogance, laziness, and greed - the same as today.
The film mostly follows ape society as it begins to crystallize into a feudal state. It evokes Apocalypto in parts, showing tribal communities being subjugated by a more complex, but also more stratified culture. It's interesting to see these historical dramas play out, but the film is more interested in how to negotiate sympathy between humans and apes. Humans are still around and apes are not certain about how to deal with them. They are capable of great and useful things, but they are also hungry for power themselves. Can we create a pluralistic society? The question looms large over our real lives as well. There's no red/blue analogues, but we are divided, and the players in the different camps regard each other with wary suspicion.
So okay, but did I like it? Well, the film is solidly alright. It has the gaudy, CGI-soaked feel of one James Cameron's Avatar films or of the Marvel franchise. There's pages and pages of IMDB trivia devoted to the novel use of AI in the film's special effects. You're not going to be very challenged by the film, even as it deals with some interesting topics. It's an entertaining and pretty film and the emphasis is on those two items: prettiness and entertainment. It's not bad, but it didn't blow me away. It's a sort of by-the-numbers big box-office epic. A sequel is planned, naturally, as there is always more of this story to tell: it has no firm point, so it can go on forever.
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