Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Movie)

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    At the Movies, the Apocalypse Has Already Arrived

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    In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Megalopolis” and more, the sense of an isolated and fearful humanity pervades this season’s films.The apocalypse started earlier this year.Back in March, “Dune: Part Two” picked up the story of Paul Atreides, set 10,000 years after a war with artificial-intelligence beings nearly obliterated humanity. The “Dune” saga suggests history is cyclical, even if the details rearrange themselves. Paul’s world once again teeters on the brink, though the characters don’t know just how close to the edge they are. No matter. The precarity is plenty palpable.Hollywood has sustained a long love affair with tales of apocalypse — look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s obsession with the end of the world. But frequently, the storytelling fits a familiar template. Humanity faces some great threat: aliens, viruses, zombies, meteors, nuclear devices, megalomaniac villains in shadowy lairs. Governments are incapable of dealing with the threat. Only some hero (a retired cop, a retired soldier, a retired superhero) can save the day. He does, and we all cheer.The “Dune” saga feels different, though, and not just because Paul Atreides is not your typical popcorn-movie messiah. This world is darker; the fate of humanity is not guaranteed. The biggest threat to life is not a single clear menace, but a mysterious confluence of factors that nobody, not even the most savvy of characters, quite understands.Here apocalypse moves away from the meaning we usually ascribe to it — mass destruction, curtains on humanity and so on — and toward its older meaning. The English word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokalypsis,” which means revelation. It’s a moment of unveiling, of the hidden things becoming clear. The curtain blows aside briefly and reality becomes lucid. Apocalypse is not always world-historical. Our lives are full of personal apocalypses; our nations experience them repeatedly, often in times of great distress. We learn who we are, what we stand for and what really matters in apocalyptic times. What comes next might be dystopian, or utopian. Most likely, it will be a bit of both.So perhaps it’s unsurprising that cinematic apocalypse, so visible everywhere, has been diversifying. (After all, the movie business is itself fast reaching an apocalyptic moment.) In March, the best picture Oscar went to “Oppenheimer,” a movie about how we arrive at moments of apocalypse. Soon after, “Civil War” — a movie set in a country in the midst of disintegrating — kicked up arguments about its politics. But its real insight was that habitually looking at trauma has changed the characters’ relationship to humanity itself, an apocalyptic realization if there ever was one.“Megalopolis,” with Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel, explores the difference between expedient relationships and those that endure.LionsgateWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The One Thing That Can Save Cinema From C.G.I. Oblivion

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      The motion-capture acting in “The Planet of the Apes” movies tries to preserve the magic of the physical world amid all the effects in a big budget franchise.He’s a goofy little ape in a puffer vest, and he’s giving us a thumbs-up. This was just a small moment of levity in an otherwise grim and operatic film, the 2017 epic “War for the Planet of the Apes.” But it stuck with me. In the midst of a dire war for the fate of humanity, we watch this misfit creature amble into the frame, dwarfed by a magisterial orangutan on one side and the stately ape revolutionary Caesar on the other, both preparing for battle. He turns to Caesar for approval, waits for an awkward beat and flashes his thumbs-up. I cannot overstate how charming it is.Up to that point, the new “Planet of the Apes” movies had mostly been Caesar’s show, with two films focused on his journey from laboratory animal to building a peaceful simian civilization in California’s Muir Woods. The films follow his evolution patiently — in part, perhaps, because they are following the steps of an actor’s process. Caesar is a digitally rendered ape, but he is played, via performance-capture technology, by Andy Serkis, the man whose bravura turn as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films elevated him to become more or less the Laurence Olivier of motion-capture acting. Some 10 years later, Caesar was Serkis’s opportunity to build a mo-cap character from scratch in front of an audience, proving just how well an actor could translate legible humanity to a CGI animal. Part of what’s so remarkable about the 2010s “Apes” films was how much they conditioned viewers to thrill at close-ups of this chimpanzee’s eyes, the performance of impossible consciousness behind them.So it was a big deal when Steve Zahn, playing that goofy little ape, snatched his own small moment. The first thing that stood out was its physicality — a wholly digital creature exhibiting unmissably human comic timing. Second was the playfulness: All this technology was being marshaled not for some action sequence or alien vista but for one funny monkey. What was most incredible, though, was its sheer ordinariness as a piece of film acting. Zahn strolled into a series dominated by Serkis’s performance and made one little attention-grabbing gesture — the sort of thing that usually happens organically, between humans on a film set. Yet here it was, rendered in pixels, gesture by gesture: The simple miracle of a stolen scene.The entire recent “Apes” universe, from 2011 onward — which now includes this month’s new “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” — was designed to let this kind of high-tech realism thrive. The films shoot partly on location, rather than using totalizing digital environments. They’re chockablock with action, but their most compelling work takes place in intimate conversation, ape to ape. Between the digital disposability of Marvel’s multiverse and the paint-by-numbers CGI smoothing of seemingly everything on Netflix, the “Apes” films remind us that we once imagined a more humane future for these tools — the re-creation of reality, rather than its replacement. To save cinema from oblivion, maybe we should take another look at the mo-cap actor.You’ll already know motion capture, or performance capture: It’s that thing where actors typically wear ridiculous bodysuits and get covered with little dots, so their movements can be recorded and then applied to computer-generated 3-D figures. When this technology emerged in the movies around the start of this century, it was by turns revelatory and embarrassing. For every Davy Jones — Bill Nighy’s menacing octopus pirate from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — there was some unholy nightmare like Tom Hanks in “Polar Express” or Jar Jar Binks, paragliding through the uncanny valley.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Power of the ‘Planet of the Apes’

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      Why is this long-running film series so gripping and effective? Because it doesn’t monkey around.When the very first “Planet of the Apes” movie opened in 1968, the movie critic at The Times, Renata Adler, found it unremarkable. “It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch,” she wrote, deeming it an “anti-war film and a science-fiction liberal tract,” with the apes representing “militarism, fascism and police brutality.” It’s probably safe to say she wasn’t expecting it to become one of the longest-running science-fiction franchises in Hollywood history.I cannot quite blame her — and not just because endless sequels weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. Watching the 1968 film, you see how close it could have veered toward a quick extinction. At times the whole thing has the quality of a skit. Actors wear monkey suits and masks (“wonderful anthropoid masks,” as Adler put it), and the attempt to draw a parallel between the apes’ civilization and the viewers’ can feel a little clumsy. It’s 1968, so there are winking catchphrases like “you can’t trust the older generation” and “never trust anyone over 30,” slogans that had been adopted by the counterculture. Had I been the reviewer back then, I might have called it “sometimes hamfisted.”Yet with regrets to Adler, the movie does work on its own terms, and it has held up extraordinarily well over the past 56 years. Charlton Heston stars as the captain of a four-person space crew that crash-lands on a planet that feels unfamiliar, where talking apes rule and humans, such as they are, have been enslaved. (One member of the crew is female, which I suppose was meant to suggest something futuristic; the first American woman didn’t go into space until 25 years after “Planet of the Apes” premiered.)Charlton Heston, far left, starred in the first “Planet of the Apes” film, from 1968.APJAC ProductionsThe movie was based on a 1963 satirical novel by the French author Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the novel “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Rod Serling, the creator of the wildly popular science-fiction TV show “The Twilight Zone,” was brought on to adapt the book for the screen. Serling’s influence is obvious from the first moments, which involve Heston in monologue about philosophical matters. More time has passed on Earth than in the spacecraft, since they’re moving at the speed of light. “Seen from out here, everything seems different,” he says. “Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely.”“Tell me, though,” he continues. “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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      Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.CRITIC’S PICKGoing ape for another ‘Apes’ movie.From left, Raka (Peter Macon), Noa (Owen Teague) and Nova (Freya Allan) in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”20th Century Studios‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’The latest in this sci-fi series follows a group of rebels as they face off against an authoritarian ruler who has twisted the peaceful teachings of a previous leader.From our review:There’s a knowing sense that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again. That’s what makes “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” powerful, in the end. It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved.In theaters. Read the full review.A thermal thriller that’s hot and cold.A scene from “Aggro Dr1ft.”Edglrd‘Aggro Dr1ft’This hallucinatory romp directed by Harmony Korine conveys the journey of an assassin entirely through thermal imaging with added digital effects.From our review:Whether it’s the thermal imaging or the augmentation, the visual style renders eyes practically invisible, leaving the actors without an important means of communication. … That absence might account for why “Aggro Dr1ft” is so unengaging on a narrative level, but the monotony might also have to have something to do with the protagonist, a hit man extraordinaire who is also (gasp) a family man. The world’s greatest assassin has been saddled with the world’s most sophomoric internal monologue. “I am a solitary hero. I am alone. I am a solitary hero. Alone,” he mumbles.In theaters. Read the full review.CRITIC’S PICKThink ‘On the Road,’ but for Gen-Z.From left, Micah Bunch, Makai Garza, Tony Aburto, Nichole Dukes and Nathaly Garcia in “Gasoline Rainbow.”Mubi/courtesy of Department of Motion Pictures‘Gasoline Rainbow’Five teenagers embark on a road trip to a “party at the end of the world” and encounter many fellow misfits along the way in the latest from filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross.From our review:There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look. There’s a loose, languorous quality to “Gasoline Rainbow,” which the Rosses shot using a mostly improvised format, a collaboration between actors and filmmakers. It feels like a home movie, or a documentary — a capture of a slice of life in which there’s no plot other than whatever happens on the road ahead.In theaters. Read the full review.A destination wedding that goes nowhere.Brooke Shields as Lana in “Mother of the Bride.”Sasidis Sasisakulporn/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Village Comes to Life in ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’

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      The director Wes Ball narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In this sequence from “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” we see how a tribe functions in an idyllic village before threats emerge. The scene follows Noa (Owen Teague), Soona (Lydia Peckham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) as they return from the ritual of collecting an eagle egg that they will nurture.Narrating the sequence, the director Wes Ball said, “The goal was really just to set up a world that was wonderful, that was ultimately going to be forever changed.”The scene was shot on location in Australia with the principal actors in performance capture gear. Ball said that they shot the sequence twice, once with the actors, and then a second time without the performers. He said he chose the best performance to be digitally dropped into the scene. He also had other performers do their movements on a stage and put them in as background in the scene as well.“It’s an interesting process where I can take all of these different little elements and layer them all together,” he said.Read the “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      What to Know Before Seeing ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’

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      Who is Caesar? And how did apes learn to talk, anyway? Your burning questions about the “Planet of the Apes” franchise answered.For some, the name “Planet of the Apes” might conjure memories of Charlton Heston in 1968. But the most recent incarnation of the sci-fi franchise has been going strong since 2011. These “Apes” movies feature no fuzzy costumes or heavy prosthetics, and instead are feats of computer generated performance capture technology.The latest one, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” (in theaters), is both a direct sequel to its predecessors and a bit of a reboot of the property. Whereas the first three films in this new series took place within a relatively compact timeline, “Kingdom” jumps centuries into the future. And yet, thematically, it is still deeply connected to what came before. So what should you know going in?Caesar is dead. Long live Caesar.Directed by Wes Ball, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” takes place “many generations” after the first trilogy of films in this monkey business: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014) and “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017). Yet, those movies’s protagonist, Caesar, is perhaps the most important unseen character in “Kingdom.” He’s long dead — we see a glimpse of his funeral — but his legacy as a leader is debated and referred to throughout the plot.Caesar (Andy Serkis) and Will Rodman (James Franco) in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”20th Century StudiosSo who is Caesar?Caesar is a chimp, played by the performance capture king Andy Serkis. “Rise” (streaming on Hulu), directed by Rupert Wyatt, introduces Caesar as a baby. His mother was a lab chimp who is killed when she lashes out. The scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) takes Caesar in and raises him himself. (“Rise” is the only movie where humans are more central to the story than apes.) As Caesar grows up it is clear he is remarkably intelligent thanks to the drug that Will has been working on, which is meant as an Alzheimer’s cure. As Will and his team continue to develop the formula it eventually becomes clear that it makes apes smart but unleashes a deadly virus on the human race. (More on that later.) Caesar still has affection for Will and his human caretakers, but he leads an uprising of mistreated apes.In “Dawn” (on Hulu and Max), which was directed by Matt Reeves and takes place about “10 winters” after the events of “Rise,” humans encounter Caesar’s camp and ask him to help them restart a dam for their survival. Caesar, being the benevolent leader he is, obliges, but is met with resistance from Koba (Toby Kebbell), an ape who saw the worst of humanity in captivity before his escape. Koba plots to overthrow Caesar by making it look like humans murdered him, and therefore leads a crew of apes to attack the humans’ compound. Caesar, however, survives and must break one of his cardinal rules: “Ape not kill ape.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Andy Serkis and Owen Teague on ‘Planet of the Apes’ Franchise

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      A conversation with Serkis, the star of the earlier films in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, and Teague, the lead of the latest film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”Noa, the hero of the new “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” is no Caesar, the commanding, Moses-like leader of the Apes, played by Andy Serkis, in the preceding three movies in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. Instead, Noa, played by Owen Teague, is a young chimp, tentatively poised between boyhood and manhood, intimidated by his father, the leader of the Eagle clan, and respectful of the troupe’s laws.But in “Kingdom,” (due May 10), Noa must face the same kinds of trials that Caesar underwent, and ponder the same moral dilemmas about the relationship between apes and humans, including the enduring question of whether peaceful coexistence can ever be possible. And his quiet brooding and subtle shifts of expression must register via performance capture — a complex process that records the movement and facial expressions of human actors and transforms them digitally into the faces of the apes.A scene from “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” featuring Noa (Teague), Nova (Freya Allan) and Raka (Peter Macon).20th Century StudiosIn a video conversation, the director Wes Ball said setting “Kingdom” some 300 years after Caesar’s death allowed for tonal and narrative continuity with the previous movies, but also offered “the freedom to be brave and do something different. We’re an extension of the Ceasar legacy, but also our own story.”Then, he said, the biggest task “was finding a new Andy Serkis. There was so much anxiety around that idea.” But after seeing Teague’s physicality and facial expressivity in an audition tape, he said, he knew they had found Noa.Luckily, the original Andy Serkis was around to help Teague, mostly known to date for supporting roles, find his leading inner ape. In a video interview, the two men discussed working with performance capture, creating a detailed imaginary world for the characters, and a finding the right balance between human and ape in movement and speech. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: Hail, Caesar

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      The latest installment in an excellent series finds mythology turning into power.For a series with a goofy premise — what if talking apes overthrew humanity — the “Planet of the Apes” universe is uncommonly thoughtful, even insightful. If science fiction situates us in a universe that’s just different enough to slip daring questions past our mental barriers, then the “Apes” movies are among the best examples. That very premise, launched with talking actors in ape costumes in the 1968 film, has given storytellers a lot to chew on, contemplating racism, authoritarianism, police brutality and, in later installments, the upending of human society by a brutal, fast-moving virus. (Oops.)Those later virus-ridden installments, a trilogy released between 2011 and 2017, are among the series’ best, and well worth revisiting. The newest film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” picks up exactly where that trilogy left off: with the death of Caesar, the ultrasmart chimpanzee who has led the apes away from what’s left of humanity and into a paradise. (The scene was a direct quotation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, but dying before he could set foot there.) The apes honor his memory and vow to keep his teachings, especially the first dictum — “ape not kill ape.” Caesar preached a gospel of peacefulness, loyalty, generosity, nonaggression and care for the earth; unlike the humans, they intend to live in harmony.The teachings of peaceful prophets, however, tend to be twisted by power-seekers, and apparently this isn’t just a human problem. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Wes Ball from a screenplay by Josh Friedman, leaps forward almost immediately by “many generations” (years matter less in this post-human world), and the inevitable has happened. The apes have fractured into tribes, while Caesar has passed from historical figure to mythic one, a figure venerated by some and forgotten by most.That there even was a Caesar is unknown to Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee whose father, Koro (Neil Sandilands) is leader of his clan and an avid breeder of birds. That clan has its own laws, mostly having to do with how to treat birds’ nests, and that’s all that Noa and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) have known.But then one day tragedy strikes, in the form of an attack on the clan by the soldiers of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the leader of a clan of coastal apes. Noa finds himself alone, searching for his clan, who have been carted away. On his journey Noa meets a human (Freya Allen) who, like the other humans, doesn’t speak.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More