Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes review: Return to monkey business pays off

Has much changed? We might as well draw a line between the Victorian chimp circus and the unstoppable appeal of the Planet of the Apes brand. Rebooting the iconic 1968 Charlton Heston ­sci-fi (via a brief, muddled revival in 2001 at the hands of Tim ­Burton) with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) began a box office rout that, following two further sequels in 2014 and 2017, would gross $1.6bn.

The trilogy displayed more intellect and visual brio (they stand as something of a watermark in motion-capture excellence) than your average actioner.

As well as that, their speculative mythologies were able to present a different class of dystopia to a new generation that was coming of age in its own disaster film. We got to see animals taking back the world while consigning us meddling humans to the status of endangered.

Monkey business is brisk business, it would seem, and when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019 there was no way that such a bankable franchise would be allowed to sit idle.​

Amazingly, this return to the world of the previous films finds the myth and all its inherent ­primatological mirrors still capable of yielding hearty fruits. This is not always the case when good film trilogies look to tack on a fourth instalment (as Indiana Jones and Toy Story can attest).

Director Wes Ball (of the Maze Runner films) and writer Josh Friedman leave a yawning 300-year gap between this and the events of the last outing. In that time, the planet really has passed to the hairy of knuckle. Nature has rewilded over any footprint of human civilisation. You and I, meanwhile, have donned loin cloths and reverted to feral ­hunter-gatherers cowering from our simian ubermensch.

A peaceful community of ­falconer-chimpanzees spend their days training eagles and foraging. Noa (Owen Teague) has procured an egg from a hard-to-reach eyrie and plans to impress his father, the tribal leader and an eagle master. On the eve of an initiation, their camp is attacked and the chimps taken prisoner by a band of vicious gorillas. Noa survives and sets off to find his kin and rescue them.

We soon divert away from a survival-revenge thriller à la Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (Ape-ocalypto?) to more interesting colours. Noa encounters a sagely orangutan called Raka (Peter ­Macon), who illuminates him on the teachings of Caesar (the heroic protagonist of the trilogy).

Positioned somewhere between revolutionary and spiritual guru, Caesar is a model for living in peace with humans and seeing past their primordial shortcomings. Proof of this comes in the dashing form of Nova (The Witcher’s Freya Allan), an unusually evolved human who stalks Noa on his journey before forming an uneasy alliance with him.

Together, they set off for a showdown with Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the maniacal ape king who has corrupted Caesar’s teachings in order to enslave apes. If he manages to unlock a long-dormant military bunker, he’ll have an ancient arsenal at his command.

Motion capture – in which the actors play their roles before being coated in CGI during post-production – delivers a finish here that is every bit as tactile and warm as the earlier outings. Each wisp of fur or facial wrinkle, every line of spittle or frown, is rendered so cleanly that you quickly suspend any thoughts of battalions of painstaking animators working year-in, year-out. Even the birds – always a good telltale of CGI laziness – are pulled off with rare regard for ­animistic essence.

Between this and Ball’s adherence to the brand’s uncommon smarts, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes sits snugly within the franchise’s proud identity and will please fans on that front. Where it misfires is in the sheer amount of it that we’re given (145 minutes, to be exact). A good 20 minutes could have been shaved off, leaving something a bit leaner and more tightly woven.

A sequel is clearly teed up in the finale. By then, the hope is that the primates behind the camera will have shown the same willingness to evolve as the ones in front of it.