Tag: Matt Reeves

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of Apes is a fun summer blockbuster.

When French writer Pierre Boulle wrote La Panéte des singes in 1963, it was meant as a wry commentary on human hubris. His most successful book to date was a war story which was adapted by director David Lean as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Boulle, who didn’t speak English, won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1957. His novel, which was translated in the UK as Monkey Planet, became an unexpected hit in England, and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox. Boulle thought the book was unfilmable, so he was shocked when Planet of the Apes became a huge hit in 1968. At the Academy Awards that year, Planet of the Apes beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Costume Design. (Legend has it that many Academy voters chose PotA because they thought Kubrick had used real apes in 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence.)

The enduring vision of Boulle’s premise has echoed across the decades, with five films and two television series in the 20th century and, beginning with a Tim Burton-directed remake in 2001, for films in this century. In this future world, the humans, who have lost the power of speech and reason, live in captivity and servitude to a society of primates. Gorillas are the warrior class, orangutans are the priestly class, and chimpanzees are scientists.

The last three PotA films, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, tell the story of how our world got that way. A medical test chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) is infected with an experimental virus, designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, that increases his intelligence. But when the virus escapes from the lab, it has the opposite effect on humans, and a global pandemic ensues which threatens the existence of humanity. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves helmed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, drawing a long and complex portrait of Caesar as a wise leader of his people — uh, apes — while a crippled humanity fights for survival. Reeves evolved a patient, detailed style, which proved to be perfect for this version of PotA, but turned positively turgid when he took on the superhero genre in The Batman.

Wes Ball of Maze Runner fame took over for the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which picks up the story many generations after the death of Caesar. Noa (Owen Teague) is the son of the chief of Eagle Clan, a group of chimps who live in harmony with nature. When he leads an expedition to gather new falcon eggs to raise in the village aviary, he strays into the forbidden Valley Beyond. When he returns, he is followed by a group of masked gorillas armed with electric lances. Eagle Clan, having never seen electricity before, is quickly overwhelmed by the raiders and kidnapped for parts unknown. Noa escapes and sets out to find his stolen tribe. Along the way, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who belongs to The Order of Caesar, a monastic order dedicated to their namesake’s two moral laws: Apes Together Strong, and Ape No Kill Ape. Together, they discover Mae (Freya Allan), a human who, they soon learn, can talk. They track the mysterious raiders until they are ambushed on a bridge and dragged back to an armed camp on the shoreline. There, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) is trying to break through a huge vault door set in the side of a sea cliff. He believes there is game-changing human technology behind the door, and that Mae knows how to open it.

Kingdom is a much more conventional sci-fi adventure story than Reeves’ meditations on the responsibilities of leadership. Its sweeping vistas of Los Angeles in ruins make for some compelling cinema, and Ball knows how to concoct a good slam-bang action sequence. Unlike the old days of Roddy McDowall emoting behind a thick mask, these apes are all motion-capture CGI creations, which sometimes causes confusion, as Noa’s chimp brethren all kinda look alike. Teague’s Noa makes a serviceable and pleasingly vulnerable hero, but he can’t live up to the masterful mo-cap performance of Andy Serkis. Sure, it’s blander than its predecessors, but taken on its own terms, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes remains a fun summer blockbuster.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
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The Batman

Robert Pattinson is the Batman in The Batman.

Batman is the most capitalist of superheroes. Superman is an immigrant, raised by farmers, who moved to the big city to become a journalist. Spider-Man is from the urban working class, the first in his family to go to college, who struggles to pay the rent. Bruce Wayne is the scion of a billionaire family who never had to work a day in his life. He lives in a city plagued by squalor and poverty, but when he is personally affected by street crime, he doesn’t pledge a part of his vast fortune to improve the lives of the most wretched, but instead decides to spend a mint on weapons, dress like a bat, sneak around at night, and beat up people. 

This is not a new criticism of the most popular superhero of the last 30 years. In Watchmen, Alan Moore made his antihero Rorschach the mirror of Batman in every respect except one: He’s dog-food-eating poor. Stripped of Batman’s playboy persona and big house, Rorschach’s secret identity Walter Kovacs is a violent, paranoid vigilante obsessed with right-wing media. Bruce Wayne is not a hero — he’s a traumatized psychotic with messianic delusions whose violent tendencies are enabled by his great wealth. That’s not really the sympathetic framing you want for your comic book hero, especially now, when the pandemic has laid bare the oligarchs’ inhuman greed.

Director Matt Reeves does attempt to address that less than generous framing in The Batman. His Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) is a rich heir who lives in a Trumpian tower penthouse, but early in the film, Alfred (Andy Serkis) tries to get him to meet with the Wayne Corp accountants, who are apoplectic because of Bruce’s excessive spending and neglect of the core businesses. Bruce isn’t really into that capitalism stuff. He wants to be left alone to use his tactical bat gear and jet car to fight crime. Like Rorschach — and another psycho vigilante, Travis Bickle — we hear Bruce’s thoughts through his journal entries. 

Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant Gordon, the last good cop in Gotham.

Gotham is plagued by a serial killer who is targeting the rich and powerful, beginning with the mayor. When Batman is called in to assist with the investigation by Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffery Wright) to investigate, Reeves teases out the Sherlock Holmes in the character’s DNA and lets Bats do some actual detecting. It seems the mysterious Riddler (Paul Dano) is leaving greeting cards addressed “To The Batman” at each crime scene. Bruce’s investigation leads him to Selena Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress braving crappy electronic music to work in a sprawling warehouse nightclub run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell). “You have a lot of cats,” says the guy dressed as a bat when he breaks into her apartment. 

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman confronts the Bat-guy.

Turns out, Selena is plotting elaborate revenge on the crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Is everyone in Gotham some kind of costumed maniac? Only the ones who aren’t cops on the take. The bat and the cat team up with Gordon to take down both a web of corrupt city officials (which included Bruce’s beloved dead father), The Riddler, and Falcone’s criminal syndicate. 

You might think that’s a lot to fit in a movie, but this one is 176 minutes long, so there’s plenty of time for too many bad guys, multiple false endings, and loving close ups of the Batmobile. Much of it works when taken on its own terms. Pattinson smears his eyeliner and broods with the best of them. The new Batmobile looks cool. Wright and Turturro own the screen. Dano is the best psychotic bat-villain since Jack Nicholson put on the Joker paint in 1989. 

But none of it can overcome the fact that this is yet another gritty reboot of Batman. Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was an emotionally crippled PTSD case during the first Bush administration. His chemistry with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was electric. But instead of dripping weaponized sexuality, a chaste Kravitz Kubrick-stares her way through repetitive set pieces. How can you cast two of the sexiest people on the planet as forbidden lovers and create not a single spark on screen — even when one of them is armed with a taser? 

There’s a good two-hour film buried in this bladder-busting, three-hour mess. If it had climaxed with the crackerjack scene where Batman confronts an incarcerated Riddler, I’d be singing a different tune. Instead, The Batman cops out and goes on for another 45 minutes of generic henchmen punching. “Maybe this is the end of the Batman,” muses a disillusioned Bruce Wayne. We should be so lucky. 

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Film Features Film/TV

War For The Planet Of The Apes

Have you ever dreamed of a world where you could see The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, The Great Escape, and The Ten Commandments remade with gorillas, monkeys, and orangutans? Sure, there’s a lot of horrible stuff going on right now, but at least we finally live in that world. Not since 1973, when Alejandro Jodorowsky recreated the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs with frogs, toads, and chameleons in The Holy Mountain, have we seen such epic animal action as we see in War for the Planet of the Apes.

Of course, I’m being facetious. That lede popped into my head during the closing moments of director Matt Reeves’ film, and it was just too juicy to pass up. I also thought it would be good to open with a joke, because this final installment of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series is as deadly serious as anything you’ll see in theaters this year. One of the many great things about the original 1968 film is that viewers are disarmed by the ludicrousness of the premise. Charlton Heston battling talking monkeys? Sounds like the setup for a comedy. But Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who adapted the film’s screenplay from a French sci-fi novel, was an expert at smuggling social commentary in innocuous-looking packages. Over the course of five films and a TV series, Apes commented on colonialism, the Vietnam War, human morality, nuclear weapons, and the civil rights movement. That it all looked like stupid popcorn fare from the outside was a feature, not a bug.

Andy Serkis as Caesar, leader of the apes.

The current simian film cycle took as its jumping off point 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. In that film, which was a prequel before the term even existed, humans created super-intelligent apes to be their slaves. The inevitable primate uprising was led by Caesar, played by Roddy McDowall, who faces hard choices as his war of liberation teeters on the edge of vengeful slaughter.

Beginning with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar’s perfunctory story arc became the focus of a new film trilogy. Caesar, now played by Andy Serkis and a team of digital motion-capture artists, was raised in a research facility, the infant of a mother called Bright Eyes who gained intelligence after being given an experimental anti-Alzheimer’s drug. In 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar’s band of primates, who communicate mostly with sign language, hid out in the woods of Northern California while the human population of the world was devastated by the Simian Flu, a disease unleashed by the same research that elevated the apes’ smarts. Caesar’s struggles to do what is best for his charges while shunning the brutality of the humans who pursue them made him this century’s most compelling and complex onscreen leader.

Amiah Miller as Nova, a mute human girl adopted by the apes.

War opens with a squad of soldiers searching for Caesar’s deep woods redoubt. The troopers are under the command of the Colonel (Woody Harrelson), a fanatical human species-ist determined to wipe out the intelligent apes. Meanwhile, Caesar’s scouts have found a new place for the apes to live, seemingly safe from the greatly diminished human population. But before he can lead the simian exodus, the apes are again attacked by the Colonel, and Caesar must choose between personal revenge and the needs of his … people.

Steve Zahn as Bad Ape

Reeves’ direction is sure, expanding on the strengths of Dawn while pushing into new territory. Harrelson’s mission is to reconstruct Marlon Brando’s performance as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Unlike Brando, he appears to have actually read the script. Caesar’s face is a masterpiece of CGI, capturing the nuances of Serkis’ motion-captured expressions. The other simians, notably Steve Zahn’s comic relief Bad Ape and Karin Konoval’s wise orangutan Maurice, make for the most sympathetic band of unlikely heroes this side of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Reeves spins riffs off the films I mentioned above, but the overall mood is of a Kurosawa samurai epic, with stoic heroes on snowy battlefields torn between good and evil. My only real objection to War is Caesar’s evolution — or perhaps devolution — from principled leader to more conventional Hollywood action hero. Forsaking his duty in favor of an ape-to-man showdown with the Colonel is a very un-Caesar move, but at least Reeves seems to understand the transgression. In the end, the greatest of apes can only watch as his people cross over into the promised land.