Hollywood’s Most Pessimistic Blockbuster Franchise

In 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the intelligent chimpanzee Caesar (played by Andy Serkis) bellows “No!” at one of his captors before striking him across the face. Despite the scene’s inevitability—the film’s title alone is a spoiler—Caesar’s defiance arrives as a shock. He becomes, for a moment, genuinely awesome to behold, at once inspiring and terrifying. Even the apes around him seem uncertain at first whether to cheer him on or cower in fear.

A scene of a character surprising others by speaking has appeared again and again throughout the series, each a suspenseful callback to a pivotal moment from the original 1968 film, which spawned a run of B movies through the 1970s. But Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest entry in the rebooted franchise that began with Rise, makes the twist land like a punch line. When a seemingly feral human calmly asserts that she has a name, she does so after the two apes accompanying her have just been discussing how she can’t possibly speak. Both of them go slack-jawed in response to her words, freezing comically. One of them, an orangutan, drops his possessions.

As with any other big-budget franchise, the rebooted Planet of the Apes films have their hallmarks: epic ape-human showdowns, superb motion-capture performances, disarmingly soulful orangutans. (I’d do anything for sweet Maurice.) Unlike most ongoing blockbuster series, however, the recent Apes films are rather grim in tone; ape domination can’t happen without the humans being defeated, after all, in this case by a virus accidentally created in a lab that made simian test subjects intelligent and humans less so. The spectacle, too, looks little like typical popcorn fare: There are no tricked-out cars being driven, no superheroes taking flight, no movie stars pulling off death-defying stunts.

Yet the rebooted franchise is now four films in, with Kingdom crossing $200 million globally at the box office in its first two weekends, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of the year. Audiences apparently can’t quit Apes, and it’s easy to see why. This is the rare series that can shape-shift with particular agility from one film to the next, dependent not on delivering more spectacular set pieces but rather on exploring headier ideas from different angles. Speech is an act of defiance in one entry; in another, it’s a humorous revelation. The films are, to varying degrees of success, big-budget thought exercises, poring over the same fundamental questions: What is the true value of humanity? Is intelligence something to be welcomed—or feared?

Trying to figure out answers to such questions from the perspective of the apes makes even the most formulaic story beats feel fresh. The apes have their own hierarchy, beliefs, and customs, some of them derived from humans—making the apes an unpredictable yet oddly familiar observer of Homo sapiens behavior. In 2014’s Dawn, their intelligence and similarities to humans allowed for profound interspecies connection while unlocking a buried hatred in the simian antagonist, Koba (Toby Kebbell). In 2017’s War, Caesar’s brilliance helped him guide his fellow apes to freedom, but not before it led him down a path of nearly self-destructive revenge. These movies posit that the intelligence and humanity gained by the apes led to both betterment and corruption, a journey to enlightenment paralleling our own. By watching them try to build a utopian society, we’re essentially watching an anthropological dissection of ourselves.

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Over and over, the films illustrate how the laws the apes attempt to follow are vulnerable to cruelty and misinterpretation. Caesar declared that “ape not kill ape,” yet he broke his own rule in Dawn and became haunted by his actions in War. “Knowledge is power” is another tenet of simian society—it’s scrawled on a wall in the ape settlement seen in Dawn—but Koba’s discovery of human weapons led to suspicion, misunderstanding, and eventual carnage. Kingdom sharply interrogates Caesar’s greatest principle established in Rise, that “apes together strong.” Set hundreds of years after Caesar’s death, the film examines how important historical figures can become abstracted into myth over time, to be misrepresented by some and entirely forgotten by others. Its villain, an ape who calls himself Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), contorts Caesar’s rally cry by kidnapping other clans of apes so they’ll be organized under his authoritarian rule.

The Apes franchise, then, captures the way humanity’s worst impulses overwhelm its best intentions. Greed in Rise, violence in Dawn, oppression in War, dishonesty in Kingdom—these are bleak themes, not the stuff of summer tentpoles. And yet, these films succeed because they toe the line between sci-fi thrills and mournful seriousness. The premise of talking apes remains absurd, but the moral conundrums they encounter hold weight. When that balance is achieved, a film like Dawn—still the best of the rebooted franchise—emerges.

Kingdom is less effective at striking that balance. The film follows a set of new ape characters led by the youthful Noa (Owen Teague), and it runs long, at nearly two and a half hours, with a rushed third act that returns to a spacefaring plot thread left hanging since Rise. William H. Macy, as a fatalistic human held captive by Proximus Caesar, is underused. And although the visual splendor of postapocalyptic Earth remains stunning and the motion-capture performances remarkably realistic, Proximus Caesar is a disappointingly shallow villain compared with what the franchise previously achieved in Koba.

Still, Kingdom takes an admirably risky swing by examining the franchise’s ongoing, deeply pessimistic themes through the lens of a coming-of-age story. Noa is young—much younger than the Caesar seen in Dawn and War—and still idealistic. His beliefs have largely been untouched by humans, most of whom have deteriorated over generations of infected populations to become primitive and feral, and he grew up not knowing that Caesar existed. By the end of the film, he’s not setting out to start a new coalition of apes or to assert his dominance; he’s merely rebuilding his home. As such, Kingdom hints that Noa’s journey may look quite different from Caesar’s, even if he faces the same problems Caesar once did. Ideas evolve just as much as a species’ biology, the film suggests. And so too, it seems, can entire blockbuster franchises.