Championzé
For all those who loved the adventures of Caesar, the sequel to Planet of the Apes: Supremacy marks its legacy with a moving prologue, which gives even greater impact to the temporal indication that follows. Here we are “several generations later”to observe the evolution of primates into multiple clans, while humans have continued to regress intellectually.
As one of its major sequences states (the tracking of a herd of men and women hunted like cattle), The New Kingdom seeks an increasingly assertive aesthetic connection with the 1968 matrix film. Photography by Gyula Pados (the two suites of Labyrinth) is intended to be more luminous and solar, less contrasted than with Matt Reeves, and by extension less rich. This slight disappointment is nevertheless offset by its raison d’être: to blur the temporal markers of the saga, both in its narrative and in its production.
Primate board
See this Planet of the Apes 4 consists of bringing together all the eras, as if Pierre Boulle’s first adaptation were suddenly upgraded with photorealistic visual effects. However, during a first part that is both educational and embodied, we understand that ape societies are still far from being as advanced as at the time of their meeting with Charlton Heston. In contact with our hero of the day, the touching Noa (Owen Teague), it’s about laws and rites of passage that have been organically created over the years.
Of course, the end result does not always achieve the poetic elegance of Matt Reeves, but We should not underestimate the choice of Wes Ball to realization. Already through his famous post-apo short film (the brilliant Ruin), the filmmaker made us feel a world after having plunged us into the action in medias res. It was also the great quality of the Labyrinth (especially in the management of the mystery of the first part), and The New Kingdom confirms this talent.
On the verge of meeting Ellie
I’m having a (Wes) Ball
Just like its predecessors, this new Planet of the Apes does not give in to the sirens of action and regular spectacle to wake up a supposedly impatient audience. On the contrary, he trusts him by highlighting the melancholy beauty of his devastated worldand the technological prowess of our attachment to non-human characters.
Wes Ball takes his time, and is contemplative at certain key moments (wonderful sequence where Noa can only mourn the loss of his village). A fundamental choice, since the film is filled with demiurge and hurried protagonists, who refuse the slow and logical evolution of the world. After all, The New Kingdom admits that everything ends up being forgotten, starting with the dominant past of humans on Earth. It’s just a shame that the feature film takes a while to develop its second part, where Noa finds herself under the control of a tyrannical king, Proximus (Kevin Durand)prophet who reappropriated the name of Caesar to better distort his philosophy.
Caesar not there
By transforming this ideological heritage into a tool of religious fanaticismthe screenplay by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, Avatar 4) imposes its best novelty, although we would have liked it to be a little more palpable and in-depth before the arrival of the third act. That said, with this jump in the chronology of the saga, we could have feared a way to reboot its issues, and undoubtedly to reduce the sail on its desperate nihilism, inherent to its nature as a prequel. It is not so.
Behind the most obvious metaphors carried by The Planet of the Apes (racism, animal abuse, military escalation, etc.), there is above all an observation of a perversion. An immutable perversion of beings, societies and their politics. The technical requirement of the saga is precisely correlated to this relationship with entropy. While it is possible to create perfect monkeys in CGI, their photorealism involves the degradation of the body and the marks of the passage of time (scars, missing or bleached hairs, etc.).
We could also criticize Wes Ball for not pushing the limits of the possible as much as Matt Reeves. Certainly, the film reminds us that a blockbuster should have at least this fairly exemplary level of finish, but The New Kingdom too rarely manages to unhook the jaw like The Confrontation And Supremacywhich each time gave the impression of imposing new standards, whether in the direct interactions of the actors with the digital monkeys, or in the rendering of certain effects (the snow on the coats).
Clever as a monkey
Who let the apes out?
If the time has no longer really come for technological upheaval, in accordance with the hierarchical upheaval of the world presented by the films, it is perhaps deep down that The Planet of the Apes has also mutated. Continuing from the first Avatar, The origins marked a clear split between humans and apes, and put us in the uncomfortable position of the opposing camp to ours, then oppressed and rebellious. Man was the antagonist, and his impossible redemption required, implicitly, to adapt to the new “superior” species.
From now on, The New Kingdom agrees with Avatar 2, where the bad guys in turn become Na’vi to better infiltrate a system that questions its pacifist ideology. The boundaries are more vague, and cannot avoid subdivisions. It’s there that The Planet of the Apes reveals her trump card: Mae (Freya Allan)human who offers Noa a form of moral anchoring, before giving the feature film all its thematic complexity.
Mae, the surprise of the film
In the same way as Proximus (of which it is the unexpected, but welcome mirror), it acts above all out of defiance of death, and through a refusal of extinction which wonderfully reflects the denial of our self-destruction (military as well as ecological). ).
Rather than accepting the course of evolution of this new nature, humans are still looking for the gold medal, despite long-term defeat. Once again, we think of James Cameron and the resolve of his Na’vi: what if war and the annihilation of humanity were the only solution to enable a better world? Perhaps, but the tragedy is to see the apes, just like the blue aliens, suffer the degradation of their utopia by drawing inspiration from their worst enemy: us.
