BANANA REPUBLIC

Opening this weekend:

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes--Generations after the death of Caesar, the chimpanzee who founded ape civilization, apes live in clans along the California coast, around the grown-over ruins of human civilization. Our young hero Noa (Owen Teague) is part of the Eagle Clan, a sort of peaceable low-tech utopia that practices fishing by falconry.

Trouble arrives in the form of a raiding party which abducts the Eagle Clan while Noa is away. He follows, along the way picking up a scholarly orangutan, Raka (Peter Macon), and a waiflike human, Mae (Freya Allan). Noa eventually finds his clan enslaved on a beach, under the rule of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a swaggering monarch complete with crown and throne, demanding in blustery rhetoric that his throng of subjects pay him obeisance outside his palace, a rusted shipwreck.

Proximus claims authority in the name of Caesar the Lawgiver, but Raka has already taught Noa that his tyranny is an outrage to the true Caesar's egalitarian traditions. What Proximus really wants, it turns out, is to open the massive door to an underground seaside vault full of old human technology and all the potential power that any potentate could want.

This fourth of the latter-day Apes movies is, one might say, the ape-iest of them, the one most immersed in an established ape culture and with the most meager human presence. Directed by Maze Runner veteran Wes Ball from a script by Josh Friedman, it's also the most modest, in blockbuster terms; the cast is made up largely of journeyman TV actors mostly unfamiliar to me. The only name player I recognized was the always reliable William H. Macy, as a human bookworm who's teaching Proximus the follies of human history, often to the King's uproarious laughter.

It's a moody, evenly paced adventure that borrows not only from the original Apes series, especially 1970's satirically seething Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but from other mythic sources including Star Wars and The Lion King. And it's admirably unsentimental, with characters seemingly ripe for redemption that aren't redeemed and alliances that don't warm into friendships. The atmosphere is bitter but bracing, and the film has a heart of hard but noble honor.

It's difficult, these days, for many of us to see any movie about autocratic rule, or the undermining of democratic values, or the allure of "strongman" leadership, as anything but a political allegory for our times. The mangy, orange-furred ape tyrant "Skar King" in the recent Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, for instance, seemed like little more than a heavy-handed, though entertaining, political cartoon. But if Proximus was intended as a stand-in for our current would-be sovereign, I have to say, his high-flown language and historical curiosity make for an overgenerous caricature.

THE APE OF THINGS TO COME

Opening this weekend:

War for the Planet of the Apes—The war of the title, between apes and humans, has been going on for a few years as this, the third of the latter-day Apes movies, begins. It’s been long enough that human soldiers write sick jokes like “BEDTIME FOR BONZO” on their helmets, and that slang specific to the war has arisen, like “Donkey” for a turncoat ape who acts as a guide to the humans.

Caesar, still voiced and performed behind “motion capture” by Andy Serkis, is still in charge of the ape stronghold in what used to be Northern California. Initially a wise leader who acts only in defense of his fellow apes, he’s turned bitter and vengeful by a particularly outrageous human attack led by an ape-loathing Colonel (Woody Harrelson). Caesar leads a small band of apes, of diverse species, on a retaliatory mission.

Along the way, their band picks up another ape that talks, and a human that doesn’t. “Bad Ape” (Steve Zahn), a zoo veteran, assumed that was his name because of how often he heard it. A little orphaned human girl (Amiah Miller) is given a name from a piece of Chevy wreckage: Nova. She’s been made mute by a virus that’s starting to afflict the human population, which the Colonel fears is a sign of a downward evolutionary slide for his species. Eventually, Caesar and his pals end up among the cruel Colonel’s prisoners.

I appreciated the nervy, barely-subtextual topical political anger under the material—the Colonel actually forces the enslaved apes to build a wall. There are religious overtones, too; Caesar seems overtly identified with Moses here. Harrelson has a gleeful good time playing the spiteful maniac Colonel, and once again Serkis gives a grave, scowling performance right through the CGI effects. Their big confrontation is the film’s dramatic high point.

This turbulent, overcast movie seemed stronger to me than 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but not as witty and exciting as 2011’s initial “reboot,” Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Both of the two sequels are pretty somber affairs; they aren’t without some humor, but neither had the same sense of nasty, subversive fun at seeing humankind humbled by our downtrodden simian cousins as Rise—or, indeed, as the 1968 original.

The apes, Caesar included, are really downtrodden here. They suffer mightily in the single-minded Colonel’s brutal captivity, and between this and the movie’s wintry atmosphere and its austere moral scheme—everything gets worse for everybody when Caesar becomes vengeful—it gets a bit grim and wearying. Ultimately, after some POW-escape thriller suspense, the apes do make a stand, and it brings this mature, reflective trilogy to a satisfying, well-earned climax, but it doesn’t give us this payoff easily. War is hell, you might say.

THE APES OF WRATH

After seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I spent the weekend geeking out with my Apes DVD collection. Here’s a quick guide to the original Apes movies, available both separately and as a boxed set:

Planet of the Apes (1968)—This adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet is a classic of austere, moody sci-fi satire. Charlton Heston is at his spitting-mad best as an astronaut who’s crash-landed on a planet where apes talk and humans don’t. His indignant fury at being manhandled by the simian set seems perfectly sincere. His costars Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter & Roddy McDowall actually manage to give expressive performances through the then-state-of-the-art makeup of John Chambers.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)—The first sequel—a clash between the warlike apes & a race of grotesque, telepathic, nuclear-bomb-worshipping mutants living under the ruins of NYC, with the humans caught in between—is perhaps the creepiest & harshest of the series, but it’s also imaginative & grimly funny. I‘ve always had a perverse fondness for this weird, downbeat movie, maybe because it was my first Apes experience, or maybe because I had the Gold Key tie-in comic-book version. A pity I read it to tatters back then; it now goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

It came with your very own “Ape Protest Poster”:

Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971)—Chimpanzees Roddy McDowall & Kim Hunter use Heston’s spaceship to go back in time to America of the early ‘70s. They’re celebrated at first, but Hunter finds she’s pregnant, fear of an ape planet sets in among the humans, & tragic trouble ensues. A highlight of this one is Ricardo Montalban, oozing courtliness as a gallant circus owner.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)—By the 1990s, apes are a slave class in America, until the articulate young chimp Caesar (McDowall yet again) rises to lead the revolution. This wild piece of agitprop is the chapter which most closely corresponds to the new film.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)—The final sequel of the original series—though short-lived live-action & cartoon TV shows would follow—shows how the human-simian rift was averted. It ends with humans & apes living in harmony, like in a cross-species Benetton ad.

Re-watching these movies, what’s odd is how much fun we found them as kids, despite their curmudgeonly misanthropy. They were about the persistence of war, oppression, bigotry, fanaticism, clannishness, anti-intellectualism & murderous paranoia, & most of them ended tragically. Even the optimism of the closing chapter was wistful & wary; their critique of humanity was irksomely hard to refute.

What made them lovable, I think, is that their cynical pessimism, though darkly comic, was never gleeful—their outrage at human folly was heartfelt. These movies may have seen a peaceful, decent future as a long shot, but they didn’t mock it as an ideal.