Return to the Planet of the Apes

Well, here's a review I never expected to be writing. 

That's not because I've been severely absent from my blog since 2019, but because I figured the Planet of the Apes reboots had ended seven years ago with a conclusion that was pretty solid and pretty final. The main protagonist of those reboots had died after all, and the last film had set things up in a way that could easily bring us full circle back to the events of the original 1968 film. What else could there be to cover?

Well, in the spirit of its subject matter, this franchise just showed us again that evolution is a never-ending process. As long as humans and hyper-intelligent apes share a planet, they'll keep finding newer and bigger problems to have with each other — and for screenwriters to write about.

And that's what's so interesting about these reboots: each installment jumps years ahead of the previous one to show us a new stage in the apes' history, so we get to see exactly how they and their problems are evolving. It also gives us the chance to explore a lot of the same themes and ideas from new perspectives since the power dynamics between humans and apes keep shifting. This latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, actually has a fairly similar plot to War for the Planet of the Apes, except that the delusional villains who enslave the hero's people this time are other apes and we get a character who's sort of a human version of Koba.

Speaking of characters from the first three films, Caesar, Maurice, Rocket, and a few others have cameos in Kingdom's prologue, but that's it. This film is both a sequel and a soft reboot that jumps ahead "many generations later" to give us a new cast of characters, including a new chimp protagonist named Noa. I'm assuming the writers gave him that name as an allegory since he literally has to save his people from a flood at one point in the film.

We get tons of new world-building this time around. We get a new orangutan character who also steals the show. We get our first mention of gibbons in the whole franchise. We even get a surprise appearance from William H. Macy for some reason, although no casting choice in this series will ever be as much of a head-scratcher as Kris Kristofferson in the Tim Burton film. And of course, we get lots of action, lots of nods to the original film, and even more of what's still some of the best character CGI put to film. All in all, Kingdom is a fun ride.

So how does it fair as a Planet of the Apes film?

As I mentioned before, this installment treads new ground by giving us a large-scale ape vs. ape conflict and also seeming to play with a few allegories. The main villain is an ape who goes by the name Proximus Caesar, a cult leader/dictator whose goal is to advance ape-kind into the planet's dominant race by forcing humans to share the secrets of their history and technology. He's presumably done his research on the name Caesar, since he often references the Roman Empire, but his preachings on the values of Caesar the ape are either sorely mistaken or deliberately twisted in order to brainwash his followers and serve his own corrupt agenda. There's some obvious social, political, and religious commentary there, with Caesar the ape even having become a savior-like figure in the eyes of the current ape clans. Just like its predecessors though, Kingdom handles this commentary with a subtle enough hand to avoid the traps that a lot of other movies fall into these days. 

The same goes for the human side of the conflict. Kingdom gives us a strong female character done right in the form of Mae, a teenage girl who manages to stay engaging and somewhat sympathetic throughout the plot even as her deception and prejudice against the apes slowly reveals itself. She's not doing what she does to be evil, she's doing it because her world has been shattered by the apes and she hasn't seen enough of their good side to accept that there are shades of gray in the struggle around her. Again, obvious commentary that's handled well. What's more, the movie ends her arc on a note that seems to suggest further development from her character if she returns in any sequels. 

I will say though that Kingdom is probably still the weakest of the Apes reboots. Noa isn't as compelling of a protagonist as Caesar, the supporting ape characters (aside from Raka the orangutan) aren't as memorable as the ones from the previous films, and the pacing could stand to speed up in many places. Still, calling a film the weakest entry in this series is like saying The Two Towers is the weakest Lord of the Rings film. It's still something to be proud of.

As a minor nitpick though, if it's even canon, the Planet of the Apes Wiki claims that Proximus is a bonobo just like Koba. Why keep making bonobos the bad guys? They're way less aggressive than common chimpanzees and way more endangered. And could this series please give us a gorilla character who doesn't get killed off? They've been through enough! 

All in all, it's nice to make my own return of sorts alongside Planet of the Apes. I don't know how long we'll have to wait for the next installment, or if any more will come after this, but like the titular apes, I've seen enough strength and evolution along the way to be hopeful for the future.

And remember: if you ever tell Maurice the orangutan that gingers have no souls, he'll simply steal yours.

The Trouble with Daenerys

I'm three episodes away from being caught up on Game of Thrones (since a financial fledgling without HBO can only legally view Season 7 by subscribing to Moochers with Friends), but I think I've seen enough of the show to have a pretty well founded opinion on every major character. One character that I want to discuss my opinion on today is Daenerys Targaryen.

She's easily the most iconic figure to come out of this series, being a white-haired beauty in blue who decimates whole armies with her trio of dragons, and she's always been one of the biggest fan favorites. She also gets praised by a lot of critics for being a strong, independent female character with a compelling story arc who builds herself into a powerful ruler from nothing and breaks all sorts of new ground in the fantasy genre.

...So it pains me to say that I really don't like her.

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe her story is handled a lot differently in the books, or maybe getting into the show this late means I didn't get to see the events of her story unveil with the proper cultural context surrounding me. Or maybe all the memes, fan art, cosplays, and so forth that I've seen built her up in my mind as a bigger badass than she actually was when I finally saw the show. I don't know, but from what I've seen so far, I think she's an entitled little punk who doesn't deserve most of the respect that she has.

When you really get down to it, Daenerys's two biggest assets that got her where she is are that her body is fireproof and that she has three dragons to do her bidding. The problem is that she never did any work to obtain these assets. She was born with the ability to endure fire, rather than having to build up an immunity to it, and she was given the dragon eggs as a wedding present and just imprinted on the dragons when they hatched. Any time she tries to resolve a conflict with something else like diplomacy or strategic planning, she fails and resorts back to these two assets -- and then she sees these cop-out successes as good reasons to strut around and demand submission from every kingdom she comes across. I wanted to reach through the TV screen and high-five Jon Snow when he shot down her arrogant little list of reasons for why he should kneel to her when they first met in Season 7.

What's worse is that for as much as Daenerys relies on the dragons to resolve everything, she hardly ever puts any effort into training them. She teaches them one command to breathe fire, and that's pretty much all we see. When the dragons start to misbehave, she just locks them up without attempting to correct their behavior and then they all turn on her until they just decide to obey her again. Where's the character growth in that?

What's frustrating about all this is that Daenerys did start out as the clever, adaptable character that I expected her to be. You see her work to earn the respect of her husband Khal Drogo and his people in Season 1, learning their language and becoming more assertive, but then she gets the dragons and it's all fire and blood from there. Okay, I know "Fire and Blood" is the motto of her family, the House Targaryen, but I do find it pretty darn hypocritical that she keeps telling people not to condemn her for what a tyrant her father was while she keeps proudly toting his family name and credo.

To be fair, I know that Daenerys does have good intentions. She wants to rid the world of slavery and establish equal rights for all people. Those are noble causes, but her way of accomplishing them is all wrong. For starters, she's extremely ignorant about the cultures that she tries to reform. She doesn't bother to learn anything about their ways before seizing control of them. She just decides who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and then takes over and gives everyone what she feels they deserve.

She never considers the big picture or long term effects of anything, and when those things start to creep in and break down the new foundation she's trying to build, her ability to rule falls apart. She starts to behave almost like a petulant child when this happens, sometimes threatening her more experienced advisors when they make suggestions that she doesn't like. She does this until the first brown-noser tells her that whatever she wants to do is best, and then she just burns everything down. And fine, she had to be headstrong like that at first to rise above all the abusive, sexist manipulators who were holding her down in the earlier seasons. However, she accomplished that rather quickly and then suddenly seemed to stop growing.

What's more, for all the revolutionary things that happen on her orders, she never does any of them herself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that her current number of personal kills is still 0. She tells her guards, executioners, and dragons to kill people for her and then pretty much just watches them do it. And no, riding her dragons around while telling them to burn armies alive doesn't count as using a weapon herself. If she wants respect as a ruler, she needs to learn how to get her own hands dirty and deliver the sentences that she passes -- to paraphrase a wisdom that Jon Snow lives by. Otherwise she's never going to get in touch with anything or become a better ruler than her father.

To the show's credit though, I think this is all the point. They're showing us how easy it is for a hero to fall from grace and become a villain if they don't act wisely. Season 7 marks the first time since the start of the series that Daenerys has to make compromises in order to further herself, and it's great. I don't know if this development was George R.R. Martin's plan for future books or if the show's screenwriters came up with it themselves, but I think it's been needed for a while. I won't give up on Daenerys yet, but no matter how much older she is than her book counterpart, she still has a lot of growing up to do.