The rebooted Planet Of The Apes series looks perpetually forward to an uncertain future
Amazing feats of mo-cap accompany movies that act as wormholes to Fox's past
With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
20th Century Fox no longer exists. The entity that spent decades as one of Hollywood’s major studios is now just a division of Disney, which purchased Fox’s film company in 2019 and has since used the label, now renamed 20th Century Studios, to brand some movies sent straight to Hulu and occasionally release genre movies in theaters. As it happens, Disney’s summer lineup for 2024 depends largely on remnants of Fox, with a new Alien movie, a Deadpool sequel that will presumably serve as a curtain call for Fox’s X-Men movies, and a new installment in the Planet Of The Apes series. Bob Iger recently assured investors that Fox will not necessarily play such a huge role in Disney’s future release schedules. Not to worry, Iger seemed to be saying; we see one of the major Hollywood players of the past century as no more than a well of IP that can be occasionally tapped, and there’s no danger that we’ll foolishly continue Fox’s rich past history of musicals, westerns, noir, or original horror. (Well, maybe on Hulu. Who knows what goes on there?) In this context, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes looks like a wormhole into Fox’s past.
The original Planet Of The Apes movies helped to establish Fox as a home for sci-fi, predating even their distribution of the Star Wars movies, and the series used their decreasing budgets and levels of prestige to smuggle in some provocative sci-fi ideas, with quintuple-feature marathons in theaters and on TV assuring that the apes would have a surprisingly formidable cultural footprint. It made sense, then, that in the wake of Star Wars, Alien, Predator, and various James Cameron projects, the studio would want to revive the franchise. Various actors and filmmakers shuffled on and off various Planet Of The Apes projects for years, stalling out off and eventually on screen: Tim Burton’s 2001 redo made a ton of money but didn’t satisfy audiences enough to justify a sequel. (“Made a ton of money but didn’t inspire a sequel” now sounds like its own brand of sci-fi.)
A decade later, however, Fox brought the property back from the brink, and that rebooted series is now four movies in, with a fifth seeming likely, and the possibility of surpassing the original movies in sight. (In terms of numbers, anyway.) With Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, the first entry under Disney’s reign, the apes now wander the ruined post-apocalyptic remains of their parent company. Though it’s comforting to see a form of Fox still making Aliens and Predators and Apes, it’s hard to say whether this counts as a victory.
Certainly Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is a lavish spectacle, mixing some seemingly real locations with a cast made up primarily of motion-capture animated characters so convincing you may forget to drop your jaw over the course of 150 minutes. It’s a long way, in other words, from Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, the 2011 movie that restarted the series without its best-known twist. At the close of the 1968 original, Charlton Helton’s astronaut character discovers that he hasn’t crash-landed on a distant planet, but rather Earth in the distant future, after mankind has wrecked things up real good, ensuring their replacement by super-intelligent primates. (Not to be outdone, the movie’s somehow-G-rated sequel manages to wreck the planet even more.) Kingdom even addresses some of that uncomfortable push-pull—the way the humans’ gradual social loss to the apes nags at them as unnatural, as somehow unfair.
The Burton movie still monkeyed around with time-travel, and produced a less strictly logical but admirably gobsmacking final twist, which most people seemed to hate (or at least find deeply confusing). So what the hell was left for poor Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to do—and set in the present day, no less? Screenwriters Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, alongside director Rupert Wyatt, took cues from Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, the terrific fourth movie in the old series, and reinterpreted some of that film’s events with a more grounded approach that also likely doubled as a more cost-effective one. Like Fox’s first X-Men movie 11 years earlier, Rise runs well under two hours—closer to 90 minutes when you take out the extensive end credits—and seemed, at the time, to inspire uncertainty in its parent company. (This kind of thing is typically consigned to hazy film-critic memories, but most press screenings for Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes happened about 48 hours before opening, not typically a sign of confidence.) These constraints also, like that first X-Men movie, give Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes an urgency that differentiates it from other movies like it.
Rupert Wyatt hasn’t gained much fanboy stature in the years since Rise, but his Apes picture really moves: His handheld camerawork is immediate without becoming ostentatiously shaky, locations and time periods shift with brisk dissolves, and there’s similar fluidity to his action-thriller filmmaking, carrying the movie from human story to ape story—and from science drama to prison-break to full-city riot. The humans-to-apes transition has a surprising kick that echoes the trick of the original film: We start out following a chemist (James Franco, seemingly unsure of how to do much besides affect a look of consternation) attempting to develop a cure for his dementia-stricken father (John Lithgow, a lucky break for the movie to have on hand), which involves secretly rescuing a lab chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis via mo-cap) and raising him as kind of a hybrid pet and son. When Caesar is taken from his family and locked away, he devises an escape—just as the Simian Flu that enhances apes’ intelligence takes hold of humanity.
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes takes humankind from what looks like our world to what looks like, well, our world a decade later—on the brink of pandemic disaster—over the course of a compact running time, all while developing Caesar and several of his ape compatriots as (mostly) non-speaking characters. Wyatt still finds time for stylish touches, like how the fakeness of Caesar’s ape-shelter habitat feels reminiscent of a movie soundstage, providing an extra burst of exhilaration when Caesar busts out through the rooftop into the nighttime. Rather than turning Planet Of The Apes chintzily “realistic,” the movie uses that kinda-sorta realism to make its leaps feel weightier and more momentous. When Caesar makes his first guttural cry of “NO!”—a much-referred-to event from the earlier series—it’s still a chill-inducing moment, even after so many sequels where Caesar and other apes chat at length.
Continuing the X-Men parallels, the immediate Apes sequels, stately and handsome as they are under the direction of Matt Reeves, have a little trouble recapturing that momentum, and sometimes threaten to sink under their own weighty tastefulness. (OK, the tastefulness part is not really part of the X-Men deal, but that first X-movie has a charm that sometimes eludes its more impressive sequels.) Their use of Fox’s beloved Canadian Forest locations is evocative, sure—more like the moody The Wolverine than the wandering-around X-Men: The Last Stand—but it’s not as much fun as watching apes turn San Francisco into an impromptu battleground. The older series may have faced diminished budgets as they went on; the third one saves money (and avoids a seemingly dead end to the previous installment) by importing a few apes to contemporaneous San Francisco. But Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, for example, takes place in a distant science-fiction society despite the corners cut on makeup and effects. Kingdom, the new post-Reeves installment, gets a little closer to that otherworldliness, and with CG that hasn’t diminished in quality—but it’s still lots of fields and trees.