Caesar is dead. Long live Caesar! For those unfamiliar with the Planet Of The Apes franchise, Caesar was the evolved chimpanzee who was the patriarch of the royal ape family and eventually became a benevolent leader and proponent of peace between humans and apes. His death has created a vacuum that comes to fruition in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
For fans, this franchise is amazingly deep in content and includes five feature films from the late sixties and seventies, a live-action television series, an animated one, a Tim Burton reboot that came out in 2001 that had its issues and then a more successful reemergence that started with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 and of which the latest film is the fourth of that series.
Throughout its entire run, film technology has played a major role in the believability of the series. From the rubber masks and make-up tricks utilised at its inception to the almost unlimited canvas afforded by state-of-the-art computer graphics, the stories have become more complex and involving. The capabilities of the filmmakers have also greatly expanded. This is especially illustrated in their ability to have the primates show real emotion.
It’s a credit to the vision of director Wes Ball (The Maze Runner trilogy) and that of his writers Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver that the end results are so interesting. They could have easily phoned it in but instead have opened the door for far more explorations of the dynamics and parallels that exist between the primates and humans in this dystopian version of a future planet Earth.
Rob Hudson
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