My husband and I spent the last few weeks catching up on the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise so that we could go see Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes for date night. I admit that after binge-watching Dawn, Rise, and War, I was worried about what I was going to get with Kingdom. Dawn starts out as an old-fashioned science fiction tale, where man’s hubris in controlling nature leads to his downfall. Rise follows the plot beats of a post-apocalyptic tragedy in the vein of The Walking Dead, where no one can be trusted, and everything eventually goes as bad as it is possible for it to go. Glimmers of hope appear, but they are just as quickly snatched away. With War, the story gets even more depressing. It’s a combination of a war film with a revenge tale, but without any of the enjoyment of cleverness that makes revenge so fun. The overall tone is one of desperation, and the only possible solution to the protagonists’ problems is the complete annihilation of humanity. With the trailers for Kingdom seeming to hint at humanity having become the cattle predicted by War, I worried I had just signed myself up to sit through another depression-fest.
Imagine my surprise when the first scenes of Kingdom followed a completely different story pattern: that of the YA fantasy novel.
**spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes throughout**
If you think about the movie in this way, I don’t think you’ll be able to unsee it. Noa, our protagonist, is not the “apprentice pig-farmer,” but he might as well be since his father is the keeper of the eagles that their small tribe uses for hunting. Noa is on the cusp of the tribe’s coming of age ritual, and a lot of the early tension of the film is about whether he and his friends will be able to participate in it. But their quiet village life is interrupted, first by a strange creature that only he sees, and then by an attack from an evil force from outside his peaceful world. From there, Noa is launched into events beyond himself which only he can solve with his inner strength of heart.
I was already pumping my fist in the air, thrilled with the plotting of this movie, relieved that it wasn’t the despairing expose of oppression that I had feared, when Noa met his Gandalf, and I knew I was going to have to write about it as soon as I got home. You see, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is only somewhat about kings and power. It’s also largely about religion.
In Noa’s village, we saw some customs that felt religious. The bond between an eagle and an ape is sacred, and forming one is the mark of an adult. The bond can only be formed on a certain day, and there are rules about how the eagle eggs are obtained and harvested. But these seem to be more traditions than anything else. Why can they only bond eagles on one particular day? We have no idea, neither do Noah and his friends, and it doesn’t seem to have moral significance. This is the religion of community bonding, traditions that stick a community together because they are traditions but have no greater reason.
After Noa’s village is destroyed, he wanders until he encounters Raka, an orangutang who is part of a monkish order dedicated to preserving the teachings of the original Caesar. We could easily mistake Raka for a Gandalf, or even a Plato or Socrates-type figure, except that his belief in Caesar has gone beyond logic into religion. For example, Raka knows that Caesar valued humans and wanted apes to treat them respectfully, and so Raka does so, though he can’t see why he should give such deference to these unintelligent beings. He knows Caesar was a historical figure, but he seems to also believe him to be semi-divine. Raka wonders if the presence of the unspeaking human that follows Noa is a sign from Caesar that he should join him in his quest. Raka also preserves sacred texts that he himself can’t read. I didn’t get a good look at the book he showed Noa, but I’m pretty confident it was a religious text, in Latin no less. Raka gives Caesar the moral code that makes sense of some of his tribal traditions, and that helps him make some difficult decisions later in the movie.
In truth, the portrayal of Raka reminded me of nothing so much as Methuselah in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
Which leads to the obvious question: is Noa actually Noah? My answer is, obviously, yes.
As the New York Times review of the movie notes, the Caesar of the first trilogy is explicitly Moses, delivering the law and leading the apes to the promised land but dying before he could set foot in it. (The parallels go farther than that, since in War, Caesar confronts one of the human overseers of the ape slaves in a way reminiscent of Moses’s break from the Egyptian nobility.) In Kingdom, we’ve moved back in time. Noa watches what God has created collapse into wickedness and participates in its destruction.
We see Proximus’s men use religion as an “opiate of the masses,” quoting Caesar’s maxim of “apes together strong” only to develop support for his rule and compliance with his building projects. The parallels between Proximus’s kingdom and ancient Rome are explicitly drawn, but I think there are also echoes of the Tower of Babel in the great wall they are building to hold back the sea so they can access the god-like knowledge hidden inside the human vault. In the end of the film, Noa does in fact bring a flood that destroys his fellow apes because they are less civilized, less righteous, than the humans.
Without Raka’s earlier religious teachings, this movie would feel like a condemnation of religion as a dangerous tool of tyrants, the gradual evolution from history to myth to religion as a corruption to fear. Apparently, earlier Planet of the Apes movies used religion only to contrast its superstitions with science as something to be discarded.
This film does something different: it shows religion as something inherent to conscious species. Noa finally realizes the human following him, May, is a thinking being when he sees her exhibit awe after looking through an old telescope. It will be a long while before he reasons with her or hears her speak, but he knows at this point that she has a soul.
By Rise, the apes have already achieved intelligence. What makes them vulnerable to the humans is their lack of civilization, of culture. They have no comprehension of back-stabbing, of treaties, of diplomacy, of moral restrictions on their behavior, and have to invent it all from scratch (but not quickly enough to prevent War). In Kingdom, we see three different ways that culture has developed, and religion, it seems, is central to each. Kingdom‘s ending seems to advocate for a middle way of religion: not unthinking traditions, not a tool to be used for power, but a moral code that connects us with the universe and with each other.
Can you tell I’ve been converted to the Planet of the Apes fandom? I absolutely need to see the next two films of this trilogy. I’m thinking about going back and watching the older movies because this newest one is so good. Have you seen them? Do they hold up in the modern era? I know the special effects won’t, but how about the storytelling?
Another sidenote: the fact that the director of this movie is currently on tap for the Legend of Zelda adaptation gives me hope it won’t be a total dud.
