Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Parent Guide

With the war for the planet won, ape leader Caesar (Andy Serkis) guided his new civilization into an oasis where he eventually died. In subsequent generations, small clans split off and spread across the world, gradually forgetting Caesar and the fall of humanity.

Noa (Owen Teague) lives peacefully in one of these distant settlements – until one day, the village is razed to the ground, the entire tribe abducted, and Noa’s father killed by a group of brutal apes claiming to work for Caesar. Noa sets out after the killers and finds along the way an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon) who tells Noa about the real Caesar – not the petty tyrant Proximus (Kevin Durand) who now uses his name. The two also meet Nova (Freya Allan), a wild human who’s been following Noa since he left home. The three of them hope to find and rescue Noa’s tribe, but Proximus isn’t easy to find…and once he’s found, even harder to manage.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by every single film in this franchise reboot. Every time one comes out, I see the trailer and think “That looks almost as fun as giving yourself a swirlie”. And then I end up watching it and, without fail, have a good time. I’m not arguing that these movies constitute the nucleus of some new movement in film, they’re just consistently interesting sci-fi action movies with an intriguing approach to their source material.

Now, if you’re new to the franchise, don’t worry: this is a good place to drop in. The film takes place “many generations” after the end of the last one and gives you all the information you need to understand the plot. This is helped by that story being absurdly familiar – it’s that great monomyth again, the hero’s journey beat for beat, and it doesn’t take much to figure out where things are going. The plot’s simplicity also makes the movie’s nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime completely inexcusable. It’s not a difficult story to tell.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is carried by the incredible performance capture technology used by Weta FX on the previous three films, which allows a cast composed almost exclusively of apes to give staggeringly human performances. These characters, despite being both non-human and entirely digital, emote so clearly with their eyes and body language that it gives the film more warmth than you would expect given its computer-based pedigree. Frankly, this technology offers more captivating performances than I’ve seen in many mediocre human-led productions.

The only area of concern for parents is violence but there is much less than would be found in the average Marvel movie, making this a pretty soft PG-13 film. The almost total absence of issues in other categories is pretty remarkable – I guess the complete collapse of human civilization has really killed the market for sex, drugs, and profanity. The apes do, eventually, learn some good old-fashioned human cussing, but it only gets used three times – burying, once and for all, the term “rude apes”. They’re better behaved than most kids.