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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Ends With a Frustrating Appeasement
The Caesar trilogy preached solidarity among apes. The new film, on the other hand, champions alliances with humans.
What’s annoying about Kingdom, though, is how all this reinterpretation focuses only on the apes, suggesting that this kind of political and theological infighting is inherent to disenfranchised groups once they obtain power, as if they’re somehow deficient when it comes to maintaining actualization. Instead, Kingdom makes “apes together strong” a warning about the allure of propaganda and a reprimand for valorizing Caesar as a political martyr, and that’s a frustratingly conservative viewpoint for a franchise that up until this point has been so sneakily radical. Franchises reboot all the time, and it’s not a bad thing when creators are given freedom to play with the material; too much nostalgia and coloring-within-the-lines can give us “Somehow, Palpatine returned” and the MCU admitting defeat by bringing Robert Downey Jr. back into the fold.
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