Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Three hundred years after Caesar, the apes have inherited the earth and the humans have reverted to something feral and speechless, which is a tidy arrangement for a franchise that has now spent a decade and a half explaining itself. Wes Ball's installment follows Noa, a young chimpanzee of a falconry clan, as he loses his home, collects a pair of companions, and walks toward a beachfront empire ruled by a tyrant who quotes a founder he has misread. The species conflict here is exactly that: a species conflict. Apes and humans are not standing in for races, classes, or any other category that would require a footnote. The film is about survival and inheritance, and it declines to make either into an allegory.

On the matter of casting, the ensemble is varied and nobody makes a point of it, which is the correct approach and also the reason the gesture registers so faintly. Freya Allan's Mae is the more interesting case. She is a capable co-lead with her own objectives, she lies to her ally, she strangles a man and later shoots another, and she ends the film with a handgun tucked behind her back while saying goodbye. That is agency of a high order. The film never stops to congratulate itself for it, which keeps the temperature low but also leaves the material sitting there, unremarked.

Proximus Caesar has built his kingdom on a corrupted reading of Caesar's teachings, and the vault beneath his settlement holds picture books showing humans once dominant and apes in cages. This is myth-making inside a fictional history, not an argument about our own. The themes of coexistence and corrupted ideology arrive through chases, floods, and eagles summoned from the sky, never through a monologue. It is a competent, patient blockbuster that has almost nothing to say about the present moment, and it says it at length.