Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes opens on a world that has already moved on. Caesar is generations dead. Apes run the place. Humans have gone feral, and the film treats that as settled history rather than a twist.
That’s a bold place to restart a franchise, and for its first hour the movie earns the gamble. Ball, working from a Josh Friedman screenplay, builds a coming-of-age story about a young chimpanzee named Noa before he asks the audience to care about the fate of two species. It’s the right instinct. It’s also where the film starts to strain under everything the series has carried before it.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Noa and the Falconry Clan
Noa (Owen Teague) belongs to a clan that practices falconry. As the film opens, he’s preparing for a coming-of-age ceremony by collecting eagle eggs with his friends Anaya and Soona. A human scavenger follows him home and cracks his egg in a scuffle before fleeing.
While hunting for a replacement, Noa runs into ape raiders carrying electric staffs. He hides. They follow his horse back to his village. He returns to find it burning, and the gorilla general Sylva kills Noa’s father, Koro, before throwing Noa off a high platform.
Noa wakes to find his clan abducted. He buries his father and sets out after them. The setup is clean and the stakes are personal, which is exactly what this movie needs. Teague, in the lead motion-capture role, plays the grief and the resolve without pushing either.
Raka, Nova, and the Name That Isn’t
Noa is joined by Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who tells him about Caesar. The human scavenger is still following them. Raka feeds her and gives her a blanket, and calls her Nova.
That name matters later. When the trio crosses paths with feral humans riding zebras, Sylva’s raiders attack. Noa and Raka pull Nova out of the fight, and she surprises them both: she’s intelligent, and she can speak. Her name, she says, is Mae. Freya Allan plays her with a wariness that keeps the character from tipping into either sidekick or threat.
Mae tells them the raiders took Noa’s clan to a beachfront settlement outside an old human vault. On the way there, Sylva ambushes them on a bridge. Raka saves Mae from drowning and is swept away by the rapids. It’s the film’s best sequence and its cruelest, and it lands because the movie spent real time on the friendship first.
Proximus Caesar and the Vault
Noa and Mae are captured and brought to the apes’ settlement. Noa reunites with his clan and meets their king, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Proximus has enslaved other clans and put them to work opening the vault so he can reach the human technology locked inside.
He invites Noa to dinner with Mae and Trevathan (William H. Macy), another speaking human who teaches Proximus about human history. The dinner is the film’s thesis scene. Proximus wants what humans had. He’s read enough history to want the empire, not just the tools.
Durand plays him as a politician more than a brute, which is the smarter choice. He doesn’t need to be the biggest ape in the room. He needs to be the one who has decided that Caesar’s mercy was a weakness, and Durand makes that read as conviction rather than cartoon villainy.
What the Movie Gets Right
The craft is not in question. Ball keeps the camera low and close, and the motion-capture work holds up in daylight, which is where this kind of performance usually falls apart. The ape faces carry the movie.
“No one can stop the reign.”
That’s the tagline, and it’s also the film’s whole argument in five words. The question Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes keeps circling is whether the reign belongs to Proximus or to someone who remembers what Caesar actually taught.
The answer is Noa, and the movie is smart enough to make that a choice rather than an inheritance. He has to decide what to do with the past before he can decide anything about the future.
Where It Slows Down
At 145 minutes, the film takes its time, and not all of that time pays off. The middle stretch — the journey, the bridge, the capture — repeats a beat the series has already played: a small group moving through hostile territory while the audience waits for the big settlement to arrive.
The movie also has to carry ten films of history on its back. It’s the fourth entry in the reboot series and the tenth overall, a standalone sequel to War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), and it spends real energy establishing that it isn’t asking you to remember all of that. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it reads as a film hedging.
The human characters get the worst of it. Mae is the exception, and Allan makes her count, but the film never quite decides how much it wants her to matter. Trevathan is a fascinating idea — a speaking human who serves an ape king and teaches him his own species’ history — and Macy gets maybe two scenes to make it land.
The Money and the Schedule
Development on a new Planet of the Apes film began in April 2019, after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox. Ball was attached as writer and director that December. Much of the screenplay was written in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and casting began in June 2022 once the script was done.
Teague was cast in the lead that August. The title and additional casting followed in the months after. Principal photography started in October 2022 in Sydney and wrapped in February 2023, on a budget of $120–160 million.
The film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on May 2, 2024, and 20th Century Studios released it in the United States on May 10. It grossed over $397 million worldwide and drew generally positive reviews from critics.
Teague’s preparation is worth noting. After being cast, he volunteered and studied the animals at the Center for Great Apes in Florida. He started with chimpanzees as a group, watching their days and how they move, but kept coming back to one chimpanzee named Bentley. It was Bentley’s curiosity that pulled Teague in, and Teague has said it was Bentley who shaped how he built Noa.
What Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Leaves Behind
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a good movie with a great first act and a long second one. It resets the series without pretending the previous films didn’t happen, and it finds a lead in Teague who can carry the weight of a franchise without imitating what came before him.
The problem is that it doesn’t quite trust its own best ideas. Proximus is the most interesting villain this series has had since the reboot began, and the film gives him a dinner scene and then a vault. Mae is the most interesting human, and the film keeps her at arm’s length. Raka is the emotional center, and the film kills him at the halfway mark.
Ball and Friedman have built something that works. It just doesn’t yet know what it wants to be when it grows up, and the next installment will have to answer that.
The Numbers
- Title: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
- Year: 2024
- Director: Wes Ball
- Writer: Josh Friedman
- Runtime: 145 minutes
- Genres: Science Fiction, Adventure, Action
- Cast: Owen Teague (Noa), Freya Allan (Nova / Mae), Kevin Durand (Proximus Caesar), Peter Macon (Raka), William H. Macy (Trevathan)
- Budget: $120–160 million
- Worldwide gross: Over $397 million
- Premiere: May 2, 2024, TCL Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles
- US release: May 10, 2024
- Score: 6.6/10 (Metacritic 66/100)
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