Nobody had the successful return of the Planet of the Apes franchise on their bingo card. It always seemed the most retrograde of sci-fi series, with Charlton Heston in a loincloth grimacing his way through a “what if?” inversion of Black Power-era America. The fear stoked by the film’s premise was fairly easy to spot: what if the white man were subjugated?
The 2011 reboot with James Franco did everything it could to bury the racial subtext beneath a medical ethics allegory: the jump from chimps to intelligent apes was caused by a flu virus genetically engineered by a greedy biotech company, while Franco’s character, Will, enjoyed a romance with Freida Pinto’s Caroline.
Events spiralled into open war in the sequels, only because bad-faith actors on both sides succumbed to paranoia and distrust. The nemesis of the series was thus not the apes, but our old pal, humanity’s worst instincts.
Humanity’s scorecard doesn’t get much better in the new film, the fourth in the present series, although, truth be told, the director Wes Ball and the screenwriter Josh Friedman have had to come up with a fresh slate of characters.
Taking place many years after the earlier films, whose events, like those in the original Star Wars films, have long rusted into myth, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is close to being a reboot of a reboot. The cities have become overgrown, humanity has regressed into a feral state and humans are hunted by the apes for slave labour.
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“Humans are slow-witted … but once were important,” a wise, old orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon) tells young Noa (Owen Teague). The whole movie is like this: three hours … long pauses … gets exhausting.
“Together strong,” Raka tells Noa after they provide a place at their campfire for a shivering girl named May (Freya Allan) who is dirty, almost mute, and has a Raquel Welch-in-a-furry-bra kind of look. She’s soon kidnapped by Proximus Caesar, an upstart ape with plans for imperial rule, thus setting in motion the movie’s odd stop-start rhythm: a brutal fight scene is followed by a brief civics lesson, which is followed by another brutal fight and another civics lesson, and so on, which suggests that something about the civics lesson isn’t, you know, getting through.
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Compared with its predecessors, the film’s stakes seem pretty low. Caesar’s encampment sits on a beach where breakwaters keep the waves back from a steel vault containing a stash of humanity’s weaponry: tanks, computer-guided missile systems and the like. Quite why the humans stashed it all on a beach is something of a mystery, but Caesar wants in, and May, after rediscovering her powers of speech, wants to stop him.
The climax is a long civics lesson followed by a long fight for that beach. Humanity is still at it, you see. Even though we are enslaved, we’ll become subjugators again given half a chance. We really are a rotten lot.
★★★☆☆
Wes Ball, 12A, 145min
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It can sometimes be a little hard to fathom Martin Scorsese’s enthusiasm for the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the pair of postwar film-makers whose revival has never truly caught on even in Powell’s native England. But when Scorsese sits down in Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger to explain the “profound effect” the pair had on him as a housebound asthmatic kid, growing up in Little Italy, New York, the director’s familiar speech rhythms, softened by the rasp of age, have a hypnotic effect.
“I was so bewitched by them as a child that they make up a big part of my film subconscious,” he says. Indeed, David Niven’s vision of the afterlife in A Matter of Life and Death, the emotional hysteria of Black Narcissus and the luscious Technicolor plumage of The Red Shoes all have the vivid hothouse bloom of images remembered in a dream.
Born in Hungary, Pressburger had fled the Nazis in Berlin, and teamed up with Powell, a shy, genteel Englishman with the florid interior life of an artist. “Expressionist exercises in high style,” Scorsese calls the pair’s films, while Peeping Tom, Powell’s film about a voyeuristic serial killer who films his own murders, shows “how close movie making can come to madness”.
He should know. Fallen on hard times and living in a cottage in Gloucestershire when the young Scorsese looked him up in the early Seventies, the elderly film-maker was “amazed” to hear of how venerated he was by a younger generation of American film-makers — not just Scorsese, but De Palma and Coppola — and later wrote that he felt the blood “course through my veins again”. David Hinton’s documentary might have had much the same effect.
★★★☆☆
David Hinton, 12A, 133min
The success of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eye-opening assembly of outtakes from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film Let It Be about the making of the Beatles album of the same name, reignited Jackson’s interest in restoring Hogg’s original, which sank out of sight after its release.
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In the immediate aftermath of the band’s break-up, fans had no interest in watching Paul and George bicker about the guitar part on Two of Us. Time has softened the shock, which now plays as a truncated version of Jackson’s superior, eight-hour version, but without the viral sensations that Jackson uncovered, such as Paul’s live composition of Get Back.
There are still gems: John and Yoko waltzing to I Me Mine, the versions of Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road, but the restoration seems more a courtesy to Hogg than anything. The rancour of the Beatles break-up has now made way for unending politesse.
★★★☆☆
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, U, 81min
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