Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: this franchise hates humans

When I was young, my mom's friend's kids came over to watch DreamWorks' 1998 classic The Prince of Egypt.

Less than 10 minutes in, they tearily demanded we turn it off. It wasn't the violence against the enslaved people that was getting to them. When they watched those people's backs cut up by whips, they weren't empathizing with the people's pain. They were imagining it happening — apparently far more tragically — to horses.

It's that misanthropy — cloaked in reverence of nature's contrasting purity — that's fuelled my hatred of the new Planet of the Apes series.

It's a pointed but shallow reboot that flips the script of the classic 1968 film by pitching humans as cartoonish villains, and apes as a metaphor for an unrelentingly exploited enslaved people. It also proves these movies have officially outlived their usefulness. 

But now a fourth, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is riding the near-flattened ripples of its predecessors to the shore.

The good news here is that as the events stretch further and further from the previous trilogy's revolution and messiah metaphors, they've become less overt. The bad news is that without that central purpose at its core — or many humans to rally against — this fourth entry has even less of a reason to exist. 

After a few lines at the beginning of Kingdom comparing the trilogy's chimpanzee champion, Caesar, to Jesus Christ, we learn we're a few centuries on. After Caesar's revolution and a monkey-improving, human-killing virus made the chimps geniuses and nearly wiped out humans, life on Planet Earth now looks very different.

We follow Noa (Owen Teague), a peacefully unambitious chimp eking out an existence with his eagle-raising tribe — until the army of nearby despot Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) puts a branding iron down on Noa's lush paradise, and kicks off one of those wonderfully human war-like things Caesar at one time so hated humans for.

Of course, that irony is something of the point, and what elicits some of Kingdom's uniqueness in disengaging from the singular ape-revolution angle. 

Because here, Noa barely even interacts with humans — aside from one cowering, mud-covered woman named Nova — let alone hates them. By this point, they have been so thoroughly massacred they're viewed as near-mythic, yet pathetic, remnants of a former time. 

Humans have mostly lost communication and higher-level thinking, the very attributes that Woody Harrelson's character — the villainous general brought in to eradicate the simian scourge once and for all — fought to defend in War for the Planet of the Apes.

There, his evil, self-stated goal was to (in an admittedly insane and vile way) stave off humankind's incipient genocide, which he feared "would destroy humanity for good this time. Not by killing us, but by robbing us of those things that make us human."

Remember, he was the bad guy.

But he was only made a villain through this franchise's endless and awkward contrivances, which show up with mind-numbing consistency.