Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the apes move through the world they've inherited. They climb a rusted hulk furred with vines, perch in a hollow that was once a stairwell, handle a curved piece of metal with no name for it. The ruins of our civilization are everywhere in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — drowned, overgrown — and the creatures living in them cannot read them. That gap, a landscape dense with meaning nobody present can decode, is where the film actually lives, underneath the chase.

Deleuze had a name for a landscape like this: the stratigraphic, or archaeological, image. He found it in films where the visible ground is emptied of the people who made it, and an absent past seems to speak through the empty space. The terrain becomes a set of layers — strata — and the image stops being a setting for action. It becomes something you excavate. Kingdom builds this literally. Gyula Pados shot on location in Australia through vintage anamorphic lenses from the late sixties, so the coastal ruins flare and soften like something photographed rather than rendered; the wreckage looks aged, sedimented, real. The apes inhabit the strata. They do not know what the strata mean.

Which makes nearly every object in the film a lectosign — Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its obvious, usable sense and has to be deciphered instead. When a tool's customary chain still holds, he called the object a mark: you see the thing, you know what comes next. Here the chains are broken. A human artifact becomes a demark, an anomaly stripped of its habit, charged with a meaning no one on screen can supply. The apes use our things without grasping them. We, watching, supply the captions they lack. The film keeps handing us this double vision, and it's the source of its melancholy.

Then it introduces someone who has figured out that broken chains can be re-forged. Proximus Caesar, the bonobo tyrant, has taken a garbled memory of the real Caesar — the moral founder of the earlier films — and rebuilt it into the origin myth of a coastal empire. He keeps a captive human, Trevathan, to read history aloud to him. He quotes Roman emperors. He styles his rule as inheritance. This is what Deleuze called the powers of the false, and Proximus is its agent: the forger. The forger isn't a simple liar. A liar concedes that the truth exists and hides it. The forger does something more radical — he makes truth and falsity undecidable, and turns that undecidability into a power to create. Proximus doesn't dispute the past. He manufactures one, and rules from it. The film's quiet horror is that it works, because there is no neutral archive to refute him.

Set against him is Raka, the orangutan who keeps Caesar's actual teaching alive. You'd expect the film to make him the guardian of truth against the forger's lie. It half does. But it's too smart to pretend Raka holds an original. He holds a transmission — a creed passed mouth to mouth, as exposed to drift as the myth Proximus built. There is no document, only fabulation, the act of telling a people into existence. Both apes are legending. One does it to free, the other to enslave. The film stakes everything on that difference while admitting the materials are the same.

It performs the same trick on itself, which is the sly part. The recovered human woman is named, eventually, Nova — a name pulled straight out of the 1968 Planet of the Apes. John Paesano's score literally quotes Jerry Goldsmith's atonal 1968 cues. The movie inherits its own past exactly the way its characters do, citing relics whose original force has half-faded. Film is a discourse, and this is a chapter openly footnoting its earlier ones.

None of this would register without the bodies carrying it. The whole reboot rests on a protocol invented step by step: Gollum, in The Two Towers, was Wētā's first fully emotive facial-capture face; King Kong refined that coding on a giant ape; Rise made a single capture ape, Serkis's Caesar, a film's protagonist; Dawn dragged the rig outdoors into daylight forest; War proved it could carry a slow, grave wilderness drama. Noa stands on all of it. Owen Teague's performance has to move naïveté into judgment through a chimpanzee's face, and it does.

The familiar machinery is still running underneath — the tyrant, the razed village, the rescue, the decisive confrontation. That is the action-image in its large form: a global situation pressing until one act transforms it, the armature every Apes film uses. What's new is what Kingdom grafts onto it. The real conflict isn't who wins the fort. It's who controls the meaning of a dead leader's name. A summer tentpole made historiography its engine, and left ape and human suspended, deliberately, with the past still up for grabs.

So watch it again for the objects. Notice who holds a human relic and whether they know what it is. Notice that the most dangerous ape in the film is the one who reads.