Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s hard to think of another franchise that so regularly under-promises and overdelivers. Its very premise of a post-mankind Earth dominated by talking primates has for five decades been kind of a running joke, and yet the actual movies themselves are consistently thoughtful and even provocative. The previous three in the long running series, the “Caesar trilogy,” have come to be highly regarded and I enjoyed all of them, but for whatever reason I brought very, very low expectations going into each one, and each time I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the secret here is that, as well made as these movies have been, they’re also weirdly forgettable. Sitting down for “Kingdom,” I could barely remember anything that happened in its immediate predecessor, much less the two earlier ones. And perhaps for that reason I found this newest entry to be, once again, surprisingly thoughtful and provocative.
For sure it’s shaggy and not particularly airtight in terms of narrative logic. But it’s well-made and entertaining throughout—and well acted too. Even the inexplicably and absurdly attractive Freya Allan (talk about “faces that have seen a smartphone”), whom I scoffed at when I saw the trailer, pulls off an agreeably weighty performance in a role that no one would argue was thought through with great care. There are some great ape performances here too, particularly Peter Macon as Raka.
But what I enjoyed most here was the film’s unusually high quotient of ambiguity. Whether by design or accident, the third act is notably absent of the typical Hollywood signaling when it comes to who to root for. There’s a bad guy, to be sure, but it’s also not at all clear that any of the factions involved in this fairly straightforward plot of tribalism gone awry is in the right. For this reason some people have accused director Wes Ball of shying away from asserting a strong point of view, but I genuinely relished not being told what to think and feel. Again, this might in fact be the function of an incoherently structured plot, as some have suggested, but there is so much of it present, and the movie seems to be fully immersing itself in this abundant ambivalence so thoroughly, that whatever the explanation I found the end result remarkable, especially for a big studio blockbuster.
Saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn where they’ve just started to replace shared tables with individual seat trays. Bummer.
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