Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: this franchise hates humans

When I was young, my mom's friend's kids came over to watch DreamWorks' 1998 classic The Prince of Egypt.

Less than 10 minutes in, they tearily demanded we turn it off. But itwasn't the violence against the enslaved people that was getting to them; when they watched those people's backs cut up by whips, they weren't empathizing with the people's pain. They were imagining it happening apparentlyfar more tragically to horses.

It's that misanthropy cloaked in reverence of nature's contrasting purity that's fuelled my hatred of the new Planet of the Apes series.

It's a pointed but shallow rebootthat flips the script of the classic 1968 film by pitchinghumans as cartoonish villains, and apes as a metaphor for an unrelentingly exploited enslaved people.It also proves these movies have officially outlived their usefulness.

But now a fourth, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is riding the near-flattened ripples of its predecessors to the shore.

The good news here is that as the events stretch further and further from the previous trilogy'srevolution and messiah metaphors, they've become less overt. The bad news is that without that central purposeat its core or many humans to rally against thisfourth entry has even less of a reason to exist.

After a few lines at the beginning of Kingdomcomparing the trilogy's chimpanzee champion, Caesar, to Jesus Christ, we learn we're a few centuries on. After Caesar's revolution and a monkey-improving, human-killing virus made the chimps geniuses and nearly wiped out humans, life on Planet Earth now looks very different.

We follow Noa (Owen Teague), a peacefully unambitious chimp eking out an existence with his eagle-raising tribe until the army of nearby despotProximus Caesar (Kevin Durand)puts a branding iron down on Noa's lush paradise, and kicks off one of those wonderfully human war-like things Caesar at one time so hated humans for.

Of course, that irony is something of the point, and what elicits some ofKingdom's uniqueness in disengaging fromthesingular ape-revolution angle.

Because here, Noa barely even interacts with humans aside from one cowering, mud-covered woman named Nova let alone hates them. By this point, they have been so thoroughly massacred they're viewed as near-mythic, yet pathetic, remnants of a former time.

Humans have mostly lost communication and higher-level thinking,the very attributes that Woody Harrelson'scharacter the villainous general brought in to eradicate the simian scourge once and for all fought to defendin War for the Planet of the Apes.

There, his evil, self-stated goal was to (in an admittedlyinsane andvile way) stave off humankind'sincipient genocide,which he feared "would destroy humanity for good this time. Not by killing us, but by robbing us of those things that make us human."

Remember, he was the bad guy.

Bad human, good ape

But he was only made a villain through this franchise's endless and awkward contrivances, which showup with mind-numbing consistency.

Throughout the series: there arethe evil humans, seemingly dipped in vats of superheated cruelty juice, bent on destroying the peaceful apes despite havinglittle motivation and an inability to do the one thing we're theoretically good at: kill.

There is its lost hero, Caesar, bent into log-line knots to try andliterally eradicate humanity, while staying completely morally blameless. And in every movie isan ineffectual but pure human tagging along, doe-eyed, to prove there's some good in us, after all if only we behaved more like those golly-gee animals close to the natural world.

But even with those writing crutches, still somewhat evident in Kingdom, my deep hatred of these movies is not due to their direction the plotting, cinematography and character work is actually usually quite strong.

The issue is deeper, and though it distracts with an inter-ape struggle for power Kingdom still rests on the inescapable metaphor there since this franchise's first.

Because aside from that famous final line, the 1968 original(based on thebook byauthor and resistance fighter Pierre Boulle) concerned itself more with the impermanence of humankind.

Planting a U.S. flag on a new planet is a joke.Charlton Heston's character laments, "Space is boundless.Itsquashes a man's ego," and we endwith one of the most iconic examples of ephemerality in cinematic history. Altogether, itemphasizes the unsettlingsensation of having anassumed pre-eminence either as human, or member of a majority reversed.

That idea did getscrewy into the 1970s sequels. But the supposedly clever gimmick that allowed these 20th-century movies toexistis justinsultingly myopic, misanthropic and immature in equal parts.

Telling the story of humanity's downfall and ape's rise from the ape's perspective narratively demands us to empathize with the ape.

And like any story actually centred aroundanimals Free Willy, Because of Winn-Dixie and theirresponsibly stupid War Horse the thesis is that there is something uniquely and innately dangerousabout humankind. And there's something betterabout animals and their purer, natural states.

Animal movies

While that take suggests a safe wayfor the critic who wants to shove all of humanity underwater so they themselves can separate themselves from it, the conceit ofPlanet of the Apesgets even more confused.

Because it'snot just an animal movie franchise: it'salso a civil rights one. Now youranimals borrow theirvisual language from Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps, Black slave revolts and,in Kingdom, Indigenous peoples with their lands and practices stolen from them in the name of progress.

Taking surface-level ideas fromAmistad'sfight for recognition as a person would bebad enough at least there's something to question. But using the type of exploitativeviolence and non-existent message seen in Will Smith'sEmancipationto push your enslaved-ape story down the track for anotherdecade makes your thesis both shallow and regressive.

And it turns your sci-fi franchise intoLimitless if it also liked to ask, "No, but where are youreallyfrom?"

Because comparing subjugated people to animals has its own controversial history. But using them as the noble savage a long-ingrained trope that otheredpeople of colour tosuggest they had both lower intelligence and more of a connection with nature by an assumed distance from civilized behaviour only complicates it for the worse.

Kingdom's use of that weird, symbolized grouping is watered down due to the mostly ape-focused plot, but brings it right back in the finale with the unprompted, unearned and frankly unneededline:

"Humans will never give up. Not until you claim all things for yourselves."

It reads as if the writers just couldn't help but return to their favourite well. And still the messages Kingdom hides under action are so self-evident that sitting through the uncanny valley of it all feels vaguely insulting. We don't need hours of synthetic, impossible to empathize withfaces to learn we shouldn't enslave or eradicate one another.

That said, it's at least still fun seeing chimps ride horses.

WATCH | Kevin Durand, Owen Teague talk about ape acting:

Kevin Durand and Owen Teague talk about ape acting

5 months ago

Duration 2:06

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest installment in the long-running franchise, hit theatres Friday. Actors Kevin Durand and Owen Teague talk about the joys and challenges of acting as apes.