Fresh take onanold franchise
The latest in the Planet of the Apes series uses cutting-edge effects not just for action but to enhance the relatability of the ape characters, writes Alistair Harkness
The Planet of the Apes films prove their durability once again with this latest instalment, a refreshingly thoughtful blockbuster that serves as its own entry point into the ongoing sci-fi saga. That’s no mean feat.
Picking up the story “generations” after the events of the excellent prequel trilogy that was released between 2010 and 2017, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the sort of film that could easily have tied itself in knots trying to connect the dots between those films and the events depicted in the 1968 original.
Instead it takes a lighttouch approach to the saga’s mythology: if you know the movies intimately there are little homages to both cycles of films; if you don’t, the brief prologue that recaps the salient details of the previous three is all the backstory you need to get sucked into this latest adventure.
That backstory reminds us there was once a super-smart simian saviour called Caesar who led an ape uprising in the wake of a man-made virus that rapidly accelerated the intelligence of primates while leaving the dwindling human population mostly mute. In the intervening centuries, Caesar (who was played by Andy Serkis; this is the first of the newer films not to feature him) has taken on mythic proportions.
Like a certain other messiah, his teachings have been wilfully misinterpreted and exploited, in this case by a crazed, powerhungry, quasi-fascist pretender to his throne called Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), whose gorilla goons roam the countryside enslaving peaceful apes to do his bidding.
Picking up on the franchise’s thematically evergreen ability to hold a mirror up to the times, director Wes Ball (the Maze Runner franchise) uses this one to explore ideas about zealotry, hubris and
nd technology, but also the ways in which individualism and mistrust can make doing the right thing a more complicated proposition. The film’s hero is a young chimpanzee called Noa (played by Owen Teague) who sets out to rescue the surviving members of his tribe after their Edenic existence is destroyed by Proximus Caesar’s soldiers. Teaming up with a wise orangutan called Raka (Peter Macon – delightful), they form an uneasy alliance with Mae (Freya Allen), a young human whose motives for following them Noa can’t quite fathom as they embark on a journey through a ruined yet lush world of verdant skyscrapers, overgrown airports and underground bunkers – the remnants of late 20th century/ early 21st century human endeavour now the Roman ruins of the future.
It’s a wonderfully evocative film in this way and Ball doesn’t fall into the trap of overloading it with relentless action sequences. Nodding to old-school westerns, it features some spectacular set-pieces, but like its predecessors it uses cutting-edge effects to enhance the relatability of the ape characters, not ratchet up the explosion count.
There’s a nice idea about the importance of imaginary friends to a child’s development buried somewhere in John Krasinski’s live-action family film IF. Sadly, The Quiet Place writer/director/star hasn’t figured out how to shape it into a meaningful, or even half-way coherent, film. Like a cross between The Sixth Sense, Monsters Inc and Harvey, its high-concept plot revolves around a 12-year-old called Bea (Cailey Fleming) who discovers she can see the acronymic IFS (Imaginary Friends) left in limbo when the children who dreamt them up not only age out of their need for them, but forget they ever existed in the first place.
Bea’s ability to see and interact with these rejected figments of other people’s imagination has something to do with the anxiety she’s feeling at the prospect of her beloved father (Krasinski) going into hospital to undergo heart surgery. In the film’s beautifully shot opening montage (clearly inspired by another Pixar classic, Up) we see that her hitherto idyllic Brooklyn childhood has already endured the tragic early death of her mother, so even though she’s putting a brave face on things as she moves back in with the grandmother (Fiona Shaw) who helped her and her father get through that previous tough time, Bea’s stoic determination to be all grown up is soon challenged by the two IFS (one a big purple monster voiced by Steve Carell, the other a weird chipmunk-faced dancer voiced by Phoebe Wallerbridge) that she discovers living in an apartment on the top floor of her grandmother’s building.
The apartment itself seems to be owned by Cal (Ryan Reynolds), a braces-sporting grown-up burdened with the task of matching these creatures to new kids who don’t have imaginary friends of their own – a nonsensical plot point that the film attempts to resolve but never quite manages as Cal and Bea gradually figure out it might be better to try to reconnect the IFS with the people who invented them in the first place.
As half-baked as this sounds, you can almost see what Krasinski is attempting here. The bureaucratic travails of those straddling a secret world behind the real world has been a rich source for fantasy in everything from A Matter of Life and Death and the aforementioned Monsters Inc to Pixar’s more recent film Soul. But Krasinski’s ideas – as charming as some of them are on a scene-by-scene basis – just don’t hang together, and while Reynolds’ charisma may give the illusion of watchability for a little while, the big touchy-feely twist it builds towards is too obvious and underwhelming to generate the emotional pay-off it desperately craves.
Krasinski’s ideas just don’t hang together