[COLUMN] In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, History is a Circle | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a story of decline. As if to signal this idea, the film opens with a funeral pyre, a memorial to the great ape Caesar (Andy Serkis), the chimpanzee protagonist of the trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and who led his brethren to freedom. His body is cremated, and much of the movie that follows is about the degradation of Caesar’s beliefs and his ideals. Caesar becomes an idea that fades and warps over time.

Of course, those earlier three films were themselves a story of collapse. Human society effectively imploded over the course of those three films. By the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a viral apocalypse was already spreading across the planet. By the start of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the survivors were huddling together in the ruins of cities trying to keep civilization on life support. By War for the Planet of the Apes, the few surviving humans were becoming mute and primitive.

However, this story of humanity’s decline was parallelled with the ascent of the apes. Caesar was a leader who believed in peace. He instilled in his followers core virtues that quickly became mantras: “apes together strong” and “ape not kill ape.” Of course, these ideas were challenged over the course of the trilogy, initially by the scarred Koba (Toby Kebell) and later by Caesar himself, but War for the Planet of the Apes ended with Caesar delivering his people to the promised land.

Those three films invited the audience to cheer the collapse of a decadent human civilization, one built on cruelty and violence. Caesar had been brutalized and tortured by human beings, from the sadistic animal sanctuary worker Dodge Landon (Tom Felton) to the mad military leader Wesley McCullough (Woody Harrelson). However, despite this, Caesar was able to find some empathy for humanity, even coming to care for the mute child Nova (Amiah Miller).

There is a cruel irony in all this, in the larger context of the franchise. While the literal continuity is tangled and ambiguous, every Planet of the Apes movie exists in the shadow of the original. Indeed, discussing Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, director Wes Ball confessed, “Truthfully for me, what was on my plate when we were thinking about this thing was the previous three movies, the Caesar Trilogy, and the ’68 original.” These movies are all in conversation with the first film.

In that film, the audience is presented with a civilization of hyper-advanced apes that has conquered and enslaved humanity. That society is corrupt and decadent. It is very much at odds with the society that Caesar wanted to build. It is a culture that has forgotten its own history. Indeed, the movie’s iconic final reveal is built on the idea that these apes have become so disconnected from their own past that they have forgotten that the Planet of the Apes was once Earth.

The end of Planet of the Apes remains one of the greatest twists in the history of cinema, and it endures in part because it is so evocative. A culture that forgets or erases its own history is doomed to repeat the mistakes that came before. Any audience even casually familiar with the original Planet of the Apes knows that Caesar’s dream of a utopian ape society and of peaceful coexistence between human and ape died and were cremated with him, appropriately enough, “interred with [his] bones.”

Caesar haunts Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Throughout the movie, various factions compete for control of Caesar’s legacy and to position themselves as his legacy. King Proximus (Kevin Durand) has his conquering soldiers repeat the phrase “for Caesar!” as a grotesque pledge, addressing his subjects with Caesar’s familiar mantras. While Raka (Peter Macon) adheres more closely to Caesar’s beliefs, the finer details are lost; he assumes, for example, that all humans must be called “Nova.”

The feral and primitive humans who drift through the American wilderness have come to be known as “the Echo.” It’s an evocative description of the remnants of a civilization that once controlled the world. Their voices long erased, these poor pathetic creatures are just shadows of their former selves, a distant reminder so far removed from their past glory that nobody seems to fully remember what they once were. Like Caesar, they are ghosts lurking on the fringe of a memory.

The circle is a major recurring visual motif in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the symbol of Caesar. Audiences who watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes will know that the circle overlapping with four other semi-circles is a depiction of the attic window through which Caesar once viewed the world. However, it is unlikely that any of Caesar’s descendants, including Raka who wears the design as a necklace, understand that original context. Instead, the circle suggests the grim arc of history.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is loosely structured as a mirror of the previous film in the franchise, War for the Planet of the Apes. Both movies are post-apocalyptic westerns, in which the hero is separated from their family. The hero embarks on a journey to an enemy fortification, picking up a human girl along the way. Their opponent is a mad man who has enslaved apes to build a wall. Separated by three centuries, the narratives echo. “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Of course, there are inversions and divergences. Caesar was a father and husband, while Noa (Owen Teague) is a young ape. The big revelation about Nova was that she couldn’t talk, while Raka and Noa are stunned that Mae (Freya Allan) can talk. Indeed, the moment where Mae stands up and shouts “Noa!” is a very deliberate invocation of Caesar’s iconic “No!” from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. While McCullough was a human enslaving apes, Proximus is an ape enslaving apes.

This is the biggest difference between Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and the previous trilogy. While those movies focused on the inevitability of conflict between groups, as humans and apes were thrown into conflict, much of the violence in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is perpetrated within groups. Noa’s father (Neil Sandilands) is murdered by Proximus’ lieutenant, Silva (Eka Darville). Freya murders Proximus’ human slave Trevathan (William H. Macy) with her own hands.

Just 300 years into its history, this young ape society is descending into brutality and decay. As with the previous Planet of the Apes movies, this plays as a none-too-subtle commentary on contemporary America. After all, America itself is only in its third century. The film is saturated with American iconography, to the point that Noa belongs to “the Eagle Tribe”, and the film suggests that Noa is being silently but consistently judged by his father’s eagle, very American imagery.

While Wes Ball’s imagery isn’t quite as evocative as Matt Reeves’ work on War for the Planet of the Apes, the film is saturated with western iconography. In obvious contrast to the original film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place on the west coast. Noa’s tribal lands end at “the Valley.” Raka maintains his archive of ape history in the overgrown ruins of LAX. Trevathan was captured “heading to the coast” after he sprained his ankle.

Proximus’ kingdom is built on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the end point of the American West. There is no more room for growth or expansion westward. While McCullough’s slave labor force built a wall to keep out his enemies, Proximus has built a wall to push back the tide, to grant him access to a secure vault built into the coastline. With no space to push outwards, Proximus’ expansionist impulses have turned inwards, in manners both literal and metaphorical.

In a literal sense, Proximus’ ambitions have turned back on themselves; his army marches east as he tries to break into the underground bunker. More metaphorically, Proximus has turned his imperial ambitions back on his own people; he conquers and enslaves other apes in a desire to build his own empire. On a more fundamental level, Proximus doesn’t hope to guide his kingdom into the future, but instead seeks to recreate the past. He is obsessed with human empires, with no regard for context. As Trevathan notes, “Roman history especially.”

As with the Eagle Tribe, this is explicitly American imagery. Images of American imperial anxiety and fear of decline have often manifested through the suggestion that the United States might be a modern Rome. This fear has been part of mainstream political discourse since at least the early 1960s, reflected in the subtext of the era’s historical epics like Spartacus. It even simmered through the era’s science-fiction. Star Trek featured multiple fascistic societies modelled on Ancient Rome.

This is woven into the fabric of the original Planet of the Apes. As writer Eric Greene points out, even beyond the narrative of a civilization in decline and the emphasis on slavery that ties it to the historical epics of the era, the apes even have ancient Roman names. For all the myriad issues with Tim Burton’s remake of Planet of the Apes, the film builds this subtext into its production design. That remake came out a year after Gladiator, which won Best Picture and tapped into millennial anxieties of American decline through the metaphor of Ancient Rome.

Although this anxiety is always bubbling away through the subconscious, the fear of imperial decline seems particularly pronounced in contemporary pop culture. In the past four years, respected publications like The Atlantic, The New York Times, Politico, and Time have all run pieces framing American decline in the context of the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of these headlines are positively fatalistic, asserting that “the end of the Roman Empire wasn’t that bad.”

This anxiety has made its way into the year’s popular culture. The tagline for Alex Garland’s provocative Civil War warns audiences that “all empires fall.” Dune: Part Two, the highest-grossing movie of the year so far, is the story of the end of an empire and the fall of an emperor. Even the titles of sequels like Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire suggest some imperial anxiety rippling through pop culture, even if it’s left unarticulated in the films themselves.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a film about the slow march of a young culture towards degradation and collapse. It feels like a narrative in which the characters’ lack of awareness of their history only deepens the tragedy that the audience knows lies waiting in their future.