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The first time I saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I wasn’t hugely impressed. I thought it was a serviceable entry into what had been a pretty excellent series (Rise, Dawn and War). The primary issue was that Caesar, portrayed with what I have seen described as “Shakespearean grandeur” by Andy Serkis (the incontestable king of motion capture performances), is here followed by Noa, played by the relatively young and unknown Owen Teague.
I’m sure Teague is a fine actor, though to my knowledge I haven’t seen him in anything. The problem I have is with the character. Noa is too weak, too sullen. He doesn’t have the gravitas that Serkis had playing Caesar. He doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. Maybe it’s unfair to compare the two, but the comparison is unavoidable. It will be running through the mind of every audience member familiar with the original trilogy, and in each case, Caesar will come out on top.
When Caesar is young, he is funny and cute and sympathetic. Noa is young, but in a bland, annoying way. Where Caesar develops into a powerful, unpredictable presence that commands attention at every moment, Noa remains generic. Where Caesar is the sun around which all other characters orbit, Noa feels secondary in his own story. He is moody and largely ineffectual, carried by the momentum of the more compelling characters around him.
It’s a story we’ve seen countless times before: adolescent on the cusp of adulthood, about to undergo the initiation rite before calamity strikes, forced on an adventure which will serve as an alternate and unofficial initiation, from which he will emerge a capable leader of the tribe. With the right twist, such a story can be satisfying. Kingdom doesn’t have that twist.
Rise, by contrast, is nothing but surprises: from the maturation of cute baby Caesar into a super-smart adult, to his incarceration and grieving the loss of his human family, to adapting to the brutality of prison life and taking command of the apes and making them super-smart, to speaking human words, to leading a breakout, to traversing San Francisco in one breathtaking setpiece after another – freeing more apes, climbing over buildings, engaging the police in an epic showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge – to a bittersweet denouement where Caesar bids farewell to his former master.
For whatever reason, I don’t care about Noa’s village being burned down and his people taken captive. I did care about Caesar being born in captivity and the tragic death of his mother in defending him. I did care about his relationships with James Franco’s Will and John Lithgow’s Charles. The latter especially wrings pathos and humour out of every moment. I care about his relationship with Maurice, Rocket and Buck. I even care about his rivalry with Tom Felton’s Dodge, because it is real. You feel it. This is because the filmmakers spent the time building those relationships between the characters, getting you to invest in each one.
When Noa is introduced with Anaya and Soona, none of them make an impact. None give you anything to grab onto in terms of personality. Each feel as perfunctory and cliched as the last, so when it comes time for those relationships to matter, they don’t. The movie falters. When Caesar is hurled into prison and left to fend for himself, not understanding why he can’t go home with Will, I felt everything he was feeling: confused and alone and frightened and angry. When Noa sees Raka die, I felt nothing.
Worse than that, I felt cheated. By killing off the only compelling character we’ve seen so far, the filmmakers are trying to elicit emotions they haven’t earned. Raka, played with deadpan humour by Peter Macon, injects some much-needed life into an otherwise dreary and predictable adventure. From the moment I saw him, I thought, “Here’s what we’ve been missing. Finally!” The decision to arbitrarily kill him off a few scenes later constitutes, in my mind, the movie’s greatest error.
Keeping Raka makes Noa more interesting by comparison. When Noa is alone, he’s just like any other teenager: terse and miserable. He’s not aloof, which is something (in a world where main characters are often too cool for their movie they are in) but neither does he have much to offer. He’s like a glowing ember that pulses but never bursts into flame. Just because he doesn’t actively offend isn’t a mark in his favour; omitting personality might be worse than having an unpleasant one. When he has Raka to bounce off, however, Noa seems darker, edgier, more interesting. In addition, you have all the colour and humour that Raka brings to the table.
It’s a problem often faced by movies with young protagonists: how to make them compelling, instead of just annoying. The original trilogy got around this by having the veteran Andy Serkis play Caesar, imbuing him with a weariness beyond most young actors. It’s not the actors’ fault that it is beyond them, it’s just that they haven’t been around long enough to be weary. Serkis has, and Caesar’s arc is all the more poignant for it.
Freya Allan’s Mae, on the other hand, suffers from the same poor characterisation as Noa. I’m not blaming the actress, who like Teague I’m sure is good in other things (though I haven’t seen them). This is largely a writing problem but may also be a young protagonist problem. Testament to this is the fact that Mae is most effective when silent: watching a “herd” of primitive humans with tears in her eyes, opening doors in the bunker like the villain in a horror movie. Setting aside how inflammatory such a statement might be when applied to a woman in a modern context, I could easily say the same thing about Noa. A good rule of thumb for adolescent protagonists might be that, unless we are speaking of a particularly gifted young actor, the fewer lines of dialogue they have the better. As soon as an actor opens their mouth, they lay themselves open to a deeper challenge that can be avoided (not easily avoided, but avoided) by just not talking. If an actor talks, they had better be able to deliver. If they can’t, if the character is annoying or unconvincing, then it’s probably better to shut them up or to cut them entirely. Every false word drains our confidence in the movie. An accumulation of hollow moments forces us to turn our backs.
To wit, at the end of Kingdom, it’s revealed that Mae is from a human settlement and has been sent out alone on the mission that brings her into conflict with Noa. This is where a movie about talking apes and neo-Roman republics in the post apocalypse really strains credibility. We are to believe that, out of all the people living at this settlement, they choose a waifish young woman to embark on a dangerous quest to retrieve a hard drive from a military bunker surrounded by the titular kingdom of adversarial apes. Perhaps she set out with companions, perhaps not, but Mae is not nearly commanding enough a presence to warrant such a belief from the audience. She does admittedly have a few tricks up her sleeve, but Furiosa she is not. Before I am accused of misogyny, I’ll again say the same thing about Noa. Too much of this movie rests on these young characters, neither of whom can gracefully bear the weight.
This is most evident in the fact that, just as Raka was the most compelling character during the first half of the film, the one who steals the show in the second half is Proximus. Kevin Durand, who I always remember from Wild Hogs (a very underrated comedy) is gleefully menacing as the self-appointed ruler of this burgeoning kingdom, shifting from charismatic to sinister at the drop of a hat. His eyes shine with terrifying intensity. “What a wonderful day!” he announces repeatedly during his opening monologue, played by Durand with something of a speech impediment as though his lips are too unwieldy or he has too much saliva in his mouth. Whenever he is onscreen, you can’t tear your eyes away. Same goes for Raka in the first half. Same goes for Caesar in the first three movies.
Whenever Noa and Mae are onscreen, sadly, I find my attention drifting. I find myself wishing that the characters were more interesting, more like Proximus or Raka or Caesar. The filmmakers seem to be under the impression that there is a maximum amount of fascination the audience is to have at any given moment, and for this reason Raka cannot be allowed to live so as not to intrude on Proximus’ half of the movie. This was not a belief shared by the filmmakers of the original trilogy, who had Caesar alongside Maurice, alongside Rocket, alongside Bad Ape, alongside Nova (who proves my point that young protagonists are better when they are silent), alongside Red the “donkey”, alongside Koba in nightmarish dream sequences, alongside Lake, alongside Cornelius. There may be a maximum amount of characters in a movie, but not a maximum amount of interesting characters.
Arguing for older protagonists is not at all the essay I set out to write, but it is the one that resulted. Possibly it stems from the objective quality of young actors and young characters, possibly from my frustration with the infantilisation of cinema more generally. We aren’t making adult movies for adults anymore, at least not for the big screen. What we have now is low-budget horror and high-budget CGI. Say what you will about the amount of CGI in the original Apes trilogy, it was, if not aimed at adult audiences, at least populated by adult characters. It dealt with adult themes. Kingdom is a movie about children for children, and though I was able to forgive more of its faults on a second watch, I cannot bring myself to say it was on par with the original trilogy. It’s not even close.
ADDENDUM I:
I had initially planned to write this essay on how the Apes films are essentially evolution-tinged biblical epics: Caesar as Moses, Rise as Exodus, Dawn and War as exploring the struggles of leadership and justice like Moses did with the Israelites in the desert, Caesar and his apes coming up against their enemies in conflicts that can seemingly only be ended when one or another of the factions are wiped out, a last-minute arrival in the Promised Land.
Kingdom continues this tradition, even more explicitly than the previous trilogy:
We see Noa endure a great flood, as Noah does in Genesis. The difference is that the former saves his tribe, where the latter watches his perish.
We see Raka carrying on the teachings of Caesar like the last priest of a dying order, even believing that Caesar is guiding his actions from the beyond, having transcended (apparently) from ape to god.
We see Proximus “taking the Lord’s name in vain” as he rules under Caesar’s mantle but eschewing the morality that was so core to the original chimp. “Ape not kill ape” has gone by the wayside. Proximus is much more interested in Roman history and its “might makes right” mentality, divorced from Caesar’s pesky Judeo-Christian ethics. In Proximus’ mind, “apes together” might be “strong” but they had better be chained together if their efforts are to be beneficial to him.
We see Noa come to the conclusion that “the law is WRONG!” – by this, he means that Proximus’ law of the jungle is wrong, and that Caesar’s morality is in fact the true law. This echoes both Josiah’s finding of a book of the law and changing his leadership entirely, as well as Christ’s subversion (some might say perfection) of the law through his teachings.
I’ll not make too much of this, other than that if filmmakers want to make biblical epics, they can just go ahead and make them. If they make them in good faith (which is not to say that the filmmaker themselves must be a believer), there is an audience starved for explicitly religious films of high quality. Mary Magdalene and Risen are good examples from recent years.
ADDENDUM II:
The inversion of humans regressing into silent animalism as apes progress to articulate civilisation is also quite interesting, and is nowhere more evident than the first time we hear an ape speak in Rise and the first time we hear a human speak in Kingdom. The fact that they say essentially the same word (Caesar: “No!”, Mae: “Noa!”) highlights this.
These essays are free, but they take a lot of time. To show your support, consider checking out my books:
Buy Leechcraft in ebook or paperback: Gone Baby Gone meets The Shining, a detective thriller with light supernatural horror themes. When a private detective is hired to find a man who went to his own funeral, all clues point to a syndicate who fake the deaths of criminals for a living… and then feed on their surrendered souls.
Preorder Hellhound: No Country for Old Men meets It Follows, a crime thriller that gradually evolves into full-blown supernatural horror. When a hitman botches a job, he finds himself pursued by an unstoppable force bent on cosmic justice.
Read my previous nine books for free.
Read my previous essays for free.