As much as I wanted to see KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES in theaters, I was never able to do so, but I did catch it streaming on Hulu recently. The trailers looked interesting, but I wasn’t sure how the film was going to play out. I am a huge fan of the original five films of the late Sixties and Seventies, and I enjoyed the prior reboot film trilogy with Andy Serkis setting the bar high in his work as Caesar leading the apes to their promised land and his death. This new film left me wondering how things would proceed. It involved a completely new story in the hands of a new director. Would it live up to the legacy established by so many films (Tim Burton’s effort notwithstanding)?

I am pleased to report that for me this film is a worthy addition to the tales of the apes, perhaps even better than the first three in the reboot trilogy, and opening the door for a fresh series. This film’s story takes place a few hundred years after the death of Caesar, where the apes are now living across the land in tribes much like Native American humans. There is a new Caesar, Proximus, seeking to unify the apes through a process of slavery and pillaging, all in an effort to build his kingdom and save the apes from the treat he sees in the humans.

It is this apes vs. humans aspect that makes this film so interesting. Gone are the Serkis Caesar’s efforts at living in peace with humans, as this film sets up a diversity with the surviving humans themselves: those living as mutes in a feral state as established in the 1968 film and carried on in the new series by way of a virus, and a separate group of humans who have survived the virus and maintain their connection to a culture of technology. It is this technological human that Caesar finds so threatening as he seeks to get access to their weapons and knowledge so that he can speed up the process of ape evolution. The main question posed at the end of KINGDOM is an old one in the franchise: can apes and humans live together, where apes function as a reminder of the animal nature and dark side of human action in the world?

In addition to a good storyline, this film expands on the prior trilogy with expansive cinematography that depicts the diversity of ape communities, from lush forests to rusted out ships on the coastline. This film also does a great job at acknowledging both the prior trilogy as well as the first ape films that got this franchise going. In the human hunt scene there are both stylistic echoes as well as snippets of Jerry Goldmith’s wonderful musical score. In addition, at one point the apes are searching through an area where humans had stored items in an attempt to survive and a child’s doll is found. When an ape picks it up it cries “momma,” a nod to the doll Taylor throws at Zaius as evidence that humans were prior to and superior to apes.

All in all I was very pleased with this film, and I’m hoping that toy makers like NECA release a Proximus figure, and that 20th Century Studios is already hard at work in pre-production for the next installment in this new series.