Planet of the Apes – The New Kingdom: a fun and exciting B series [critique]

By mixing an initiatory story, a great adventure film with multiple hair-raising scenes and a nervous infiltration film, Wes Ball succeeds in his bet.

Friday on Canal + is blockbuster evening. Just before the holidays, the one scheduled at 9:10 p.m. is perfectly entertaining: Planet of the Apes – The New Kingdomby Wes Ball, had a lot more to First upon its release. It will be followed by Furiosa, by George Milleralso successful and already available on MyCanal. Here is our review:

In the early 2010s, Rupert Wyatt decided to relaunch the franchise Planet of the Apes. Light years away from the 1968 masterpiece Matrix (with Charlton Heston), this reboot followed a young chimpanzee who would transform over the course of three films into the leader of the simian people. The trilogy was an origin story explaining how ape supremacy on Earth came to be. So long before Charlton’s arrival and his discovery of the buried Statue of Liberty…

The New Kingdom established itself from the start as a new impetus. We are a few centuries after the events of the saga of Wyatt and Reeves. Men have been reduced to a savage state, Caesar is dead. Instead, a new leader appeared, Proximus, a tyrannical and cruel bonobo. He rules over the apes through violence and destruction. Besides, that’s what this film opens with. Noa is a young chimpanzee who lives in peace with his clan when Proximus arrives and ravages his camp. To try to save his family, Noa will then begin a long journey and come across a strange human along the way….

Although sometimes spectacular, the previous trilogy was often very theoretical. Each film displayed the ambition of a treatise on political and philosophical history drawing the DNA of the saga towards meta reflection – worthy of the original. Because in 68, when adapting Boulle, Schaffner was obviously thinking about the Vietnamese conflict and nuclear proliferation.

This New Kingdom is signed Wes Ball. The filmmaker distinguished himself by directing the very nervous first part of the Labyrinth. His version of the Planet of the Apes has impressive sets and special effects. From the start, we see that the ambition is clearly to impress. The world where the monkeys live is fabulous, a strange mix between Pandora and the underground world of Kong Vs Godzilla. The visual inventiveness, the overheating shots (the destruction of the camp), the suspense… everything exudes new energy.

No more metaphor, time for action. Both an initiatory story (we follow Noa as he discovers the world), a great adventure film with many hair-raising scenes and a nervous infiltration film (Noa must penetrate a secret base), this New Kingdom basically reminds us that the 1968 film was as much a political reflection as a real B movie, fun and exciting. It is this last option that Wes Ball chose.

Trailer:

Will the new Planet of the Apes films one day make the connection with the 1968 film?