Apes and humans, working together, for the greater good
dir: Wes Ball
2024
The names are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean the films are getting shittier. One day they’ll come out with The Movie about the Book about the TV series about the Unincorporated area adjacent to the Subdivision next to the Hill Below the Mountain Upon Which the Fiefdom of the Dukedom to the Empire of the Planet in the Solar System of the Apes that Talk (they don’t have tails), and people like me will still voluntarily waddle along into the cinemas to watch them. And when buying tickets I’ll just have to say, in between shoveling popcorn down my gullet “the monkey one”, and they’ll know which one I mean, unless there’s a Kong versus or x one in the cinemas concurrently.
I thought the three movies that starred Andy Serkis as Caesar, obviously under layers and layers of digital effects, were absolute aces, real good, better than bad. Genuinely, I thought they were amazing, underpinned as they were by Serkis’ magnificent performance as the lead.
Of course, with the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes, and with this flick jumping about 300 years into the future, one in which apes rule and humans mostly drool, Caesar himself is no more. But his name lives on, and some of his beliefs, and teachings, linger.
At this stage of life on the planet, apes live in their tribes, humans are rarely glimpsed, and if they’re seen at all they’re mostly seen as a nuisance, kind of like foxes or possums. They’re not exactly writing hip-hop musicals or social media apps to bully each other with, but they are training eagles to hunt fish for them. Whatever intelligence they got that humanity lost hasn’t translated into using language beyond the spoken, so they have not advanced to a comparable level that humanity was at when it fell. They’re probably at the stage humanity was at 10,000 years ago, at the agrarian stage.
Noa (Owen Teague) is our new audience surrogate, or at the very least our main character. He is the son of the chief, naturally, in a tribe where one’s ability to train eagles seems to be of paramount importance. He is a chimpanzee, like Caesar, and has some leadership qualities. But he has doubts.
He is not the strongest chimp, nor the smartest, and as the son of a chief who isn’t, at the ordained time, able to bring back an eagle egg safely for some bonding ceremony, it looks like he’s cursed to live a life of mediocrity, even as a nepo baby.
Caesar isn’t really remembered by the apes, not as he was. His name is used to conjure with, and his symbol persists (even the faithful who remember his exploits kindly don’t even know what the symbol comes from, but how could they?)
Naturally, a populist, violent bonobo calling himself Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand, one of Canada’s greatest exports) steals a bunch of votes and hearts and minds by enslaving a bunch of other apes, turning Caesar’s words of Apes Together Strong, into “you’re all slaves to my glory.”
But that’s by the by. The real important thing is, there’s apes peacefully living in tribes, there’s these ones working for Proximus that enslave the peaceful tribes, and thus Noa’s peeps are not going to be left in peace for very long.
They all get enslaved, except for Noa, who goes on a journey in order to find his peeps and unenslave them. How? Uh, dunno. He never articulates a plan that I got to hear. He has no set of special abilities or tools that indicate how he would be able to take on Proximus’ army, which includes other large apes, including gorillas. And he doesn’t have an army of his own. He has one old wise orangutan for a while, Rakka (Peter Macon), talking in his ear, fluffing him up, carrying on the faithful old ways of Caesar, and a human follower, scurrying behind them, like the vermin that she is.
Rakka says she should be called Nova, because that’s what they always call them, which is less of a deep cut reference and more of an acknowledgement that they repeat tropes and titles because they’re obligated to, but the girl says “Nuh uh, I have a name, and it’s Mae (Freya Allan).” The apes are less surprised that they got her name wrong, and more astounded because she talks. She talks! Just like an ape! Who does she think she is? Bow down before your monkey betters.
Well. What role do you think a human would play in a flick where apes think they’re the dominant life form on the planet? I mean, they’re all wrong, because clearly bacteria is the dominant life form still, if it’s measured in terms of population size and ubiquity. Neither group of hominids or near hominids accepts this natural order. Mae’s agenda is, contrary to what usually happens in these flicks, not to show that apes and humans could live side-by-side in harmony.
As such while she achieves some kind of wary détente with Noa, she mostly follows her own agenda. She feels less like someone who’s grown up in underground caves taught about the old world where human supremacy almost doomed all species to extinction and everyone rode motorised scooters everywhere, and more like someone who’s watched all the movies, and hates all the monkeys that she sees, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Zee. She knows how all this came about, laments that humans lost their way, and seeks not a new truce, but to bring back the old world, where apes knew their place in the natural scheme of things (dying for logging company interests), and did little more to amuse themselves than flinging their poo around at the zoo.
The apes, though, they’re not going to go back to the cages willingly. In Proximus’ endeavours, he is aided by his own pet human, being a chap who calls himself Trevathan (the great William H. Macy, reprising his character from the US version of Shameless), someone whose primary virtue is that he can read. He delights Proximus with tales of ancient Rome, hence the two parts of his name, but mostly, unlike his role in Shameless, he’s not just betraying the Gallagher family; he’s betraying the remnants of humanity by aiding this petty tyrant for the scraps from his table.
Mae and Trevathan are not going to get along, at all, once they meet, are they? He thinks he’s grooming his replacement, but her contempt for him rolls off the screen.
You could be asking yourself, if someone like Proximus is enslaving apes, what grand project does he have them all slaving away at? Well, going along with some watery Biblical themes, and the fact that our protagonist is called Noa, there is some place with huge concrete walls near the coast that Proximus is convinced contains human technology, weaponry, general greatness that he can hastily adopt, and enlarge his kingdom. The slaves slave away at the doors of the vault, trying to force them open. Noa cares nought for these things, but Mae wants to get in for her own reasons, knowing as well that the last thing she wants is for monkeykind to get even more embiggened. So her plan might be – get the macguffin, the thing what will undumbify the humans, get some guns, maybe grab some chips and dips? And then kill everyone.
Noa doesn’t want anything so fancy. He just wants his people back, an eagle to call his own, a return to the treehouses where they used to live, and for Mae not to kill everyone. It’s an interesting dynamic they have going, between Noa and Mae. And even though the episodic nature of these flicks is such that of course there’s another one coming, I think that this flick was better than okay, and that the next one could be interesting as well. Just like all the previous flicks in this rebooted series, and the recent Kong Godzilla flicks, I am amazed at how expressive they are making the faces of these ape protagonists. They can convey so much emotion, so much feeling, far more than the humans are capable of. There’s no, for me, confusion or ‘uncanny valley’ confusion for me with the way these creatures come across: I have no difficulty believing they’re ‘real’. Of course it’s all CGI trickery, but when it works, it works so well.
Much of the landscape is fallen skyscrapers taken over by trees and vegetation, which you love to see, but a lot of scenes set in nature seemed surprisingly like the Australian bush, in that there was a lot of eucalyptus trees and such, and then I found out much of that was shot in New South Wales, so, yay for the Australian film industry?
It’s good to see that the humanless wastelands of the future can look like the Australian present and be completely believable, at least to Americans.
I enjoyed this flick. Noa is not as compelling a protagonist as Caesar or those close to him in the earlier flicks, but he’ll do for now. Maybe he’ll grow, maybe he won’t even be in the next one, but he’s okay for here. And Freya Allan, who’s been in a bunch of stuff I’ve seen lately, including Ciri in the Witcher, and as the main character in horror flick Baghead, is pretty feral and fierce here. I may not agree with it, but I can see her leading the inevitable War Against the Constitutional Monarchy of the Apes, without question.
8 times why can’t they all just get along out of 10
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“Oh no, I was wrong, it was Earth, all along.
Well, you’ve finally made a monkey
they’ve finally made a monkey
you’ve finally made a monkey out of me.” - Planet of the Apes: The Musical!
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