2024-05-10 10:31:42
Caesar is dead, long live Caesar! This is how “Planet of the Apes: New Kingdom” begins. As a reminder, in “Prevolution” (2011), Caesar is a small baby monkey who is raised by humans as a medical animal experiment remnant. As a result of the failed pharmaceutical project, the people are swept away by a deadly epidemic, while the monkeys receive an intelligence booster. Caesar leads a monkey liberation front over the Golden Gate Bridge into the woods outside San Francisco.
The people decimated by the “monkey flu” and the monkeys meet again in “Revolution” (2014), both with warmongers and friends of peace in their ranks. Although Caesar succeeds in overthrowing the misanthropic ape rebel, reconciliation does not take place, so in “Survival” (2017) a crazy colonel who is waging a jihad against all apes still has to be stopped. It succeeds and the great Caesar leads his ape troops like Moses to the promised land, but dies in the end.
Freya Allan as Nova in “Planet of the Apes: New Kingdom”
Quelle: © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Now, seven years later, “New Kingdom” loosely follows on from its previous films. At the beginning it is shown how Caesar is burned like a Roman emperor on the Field of Mars, surrounded by his loyal followers who – like the original horde to the first patriarch after his death – swear to his eternal memory. At the time of the main plot, however, this memory is not in good shape at all. This is where the film develops its main thesis: the oblivion of history promotes the rise of false Caesars.
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The fake Caesar in the film is a gorilla who calls himself Caesar Proximus. He lives in the rusty ruins of a cruise ship that ran aground like the Costa Concordia. What the chief ape is striving for is two things: On the one hand, ape-like manpower, which his mounted henchmen on the edges of the empire forcefully capture. And on the other hand, human knowledge. Because knowledge is power, especially when it comes to firearms and similar blossoms of human culture.
Caesar Proximus built the ape forced labor camp in front of a steel gate that leads to a bunker from human times. There he suspects, quite rightly, that there are a few more wonderful things for ape subjugation, in addition to the electric shock batons that his gang already uses extensively. Whatever this Caesar gets his hands on, no matter what knowledge or tools, becomes a means of subjugation, never a means of liberation.
Caesar Proximus’s advisor is a human being, a fallen intellectual who would prefer to read Kurt Vonnegut, but is obliged by his master to read late Roman history. One thinks of Caesarism, which was established as a form of government by Augustus after the death of Caesar and the civil war. Although this led to a short-term prosperity, it could not stop the collapse of the empire. And then the great Jesus crisis occurred during the time of Emperor Augustus.
Conflict between two world views
The story of Jesus and Augustus would never be so interesting if it were not a conflict between two mutually exclusive worldviews. Both based their claim to a divinity that excludes other gods. The same goes for “New Kingdom”: “I am Caesar!” exclaims Proximus, who lets his subjects worship him in a cult. To which the young chimpanzee Noa, a conscientious newcomer to the late Roman ape dystopia, replies: “He is not Caesar.”
Next Caesar (Kevin Durand)
Quelle: © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
How does Noah know he’s dealing with a fake Caesar? From the praised tradition he has from the wise orangutan Raka. He lives with books – symbols have meanings, a big discovery for the young monkey who doesn’t come from a written culture! – in an abandoned shopping mall, the decadent consumer temples of the last people. It is Raka who introduces Noah to the true Caesar’s law: monkeys should never kill monkeys. In short: Thou shalt not kill.
Since Noah and Caesar Proximus both refer to Caesar and his law – one of life, the other of violence – a poor heroic story becomes the epic final battle of antagonistic life forms and cosmologies. The trigger is that the Emperor Proximus invades Noa’s cosmos by force and kidnaps his monkey tribe, the Eagle Clan. “I will bring them home,” says Noa in the English original. For a moment you think of those kidnapped in Gaza.
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Before the hordes of the expansionist slave-owning society invade, Noa’s tribe lives peacefully in a mixture of sustainability paradise and primitive communism. The monkeys live in wooden towers near the overgrown steel skyscraper frames of a former human metropolis, and tamed eagles catch fish that are smoked. The rule of the monkey over the monkey seems to have been abolished, the exploitation of nature ended and religion superfluous. Almost a utopia.
In order to free his kidnapped tribesmen, Noa travels through atmospheric post-apocalyptic landscapes, the aesthetic precursor of which can currently be admired in the cinema in Alex Garland’s apocalyptic political thriller “Civil War”. His companions: Raka as a representative of the orangutan intelligence. And Mae, a human woman who – much to the monkeys’ surprise – can talk. Surprising because the “monkey flu” has mutated and no longer kills the surviving people, but silences them, so that they splash around in water holes like zebras as a historyless horde of animals.
Noa’s journey is – as always with “Planet of the Apes”, from Pierre Boulle’s novel, the first film series from 1968, the remake by Tim Burton from 2001 to the current series – a philosophical expedition to the human condition as reflected in the great apes. Rarely has Marx’s statement that human anatomy is the key to ape anatomy achieved such clarity as in the “Planet of the Apes” films, with the effects of studio Wētā FX providing the necessary realism.
Man as an animal
Attempts to grasp what is human range from Aristotle’s “language-gifted animal” to Benjamin Franklin’s “tool making animal” to Immanuel Kant’s “animal that can perfect itself”. In “New Kingdom” we see talking, tool-making monkeys and people who could perfect themselves as “zoon politikon” in a community, insofar as the community opens up such possibilities. Spoiler: The Kingdom of Caesar Proximus does not.
In one scene, “New Kingdom” dares to approach what humans and apes have in common. When looking through a space telescope, the light from the stars falls on Noa’s retina. When he observes the same thing with Mae shortly afterwards, he is convinced that this reflection of the eternal in the eyes of the mortal individual creates a commonality across species boundaries. It is the discovery of the immortal soul that stands for a universalism as we know it from Christianity.
Two monkeys in front of the campfire
Quelle: © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
So finally the forms of life and worldviews inevitably crash into each other: After Noah has restored Caesar’s true law through a flood of biblical proportions that befits his name, which washes away the false Caesar along with his kingdom, one question remains unanswered: Can humans and apes live together? Noa and his gang of monkeys have legitimate doubts about this since they saw monkeys behind bars in a picture book for human children.
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At the end of “New Kingdom” it also becomes clear that there are more people like Mae who have fled the virus by going into quarantine. With a memory card – the share of knowledge in the ape’s incarnation – Mae returns to her base camp before the well-deserved cliffhanger finally comes after almost two and a half hours, which suggests that the fall of the false Caesar is far from being the last word in the ascent and the fall of the ape and human civilizations.
For evangelical creationists and enemies of the theory of evolution, it may seem surprising that the most Christian film of the year has almost exclusively apes as protagonists, although it is played by human actors such as Owen Teague as Noa, Kevin Durand as Caesar Proximus, Peter Macon as Raka and Freya Allen as Mae will be embodied. What director Wes Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman have achieved with “Planet of the Apes: New Kingdom” is an impressive new chapter in the saga – an action spectacle in which universalism triumphs over false rule.
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