Rocky Evolutions 

KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. It's been a while since the most recent installment in this, the ongoing pre-history of the Apes saga. That movie, War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), took us on a self-aware journey into the heart of darkness, complete with Woody Harrelson doing his best Colonel Kurtz. Shot through with a sense of apocalyptic inevitability, War felt like an appropriate, finely executed final chapter in a trilogy (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2011; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 2014) that far surpassed my own, admittedly limited expectations.

Those expectations (and their limits) may be the real crux of the present issue. In its current, ongoing iteration, the Apes franchise has yielded opportunities for some exciting moviemaking, from the cinematography to the effects to the surprisingly sophisticated animal acting. But this is still a story drawn from 60-year-old source material, a series based on a series that, while much beloved among a certain generation, has largely fallen away in terms of greater audience awareness. That anyone would go back to the well this many times — especially in light of Tim Burton's widely excoriated and quickly forgotten 2001 attempt at it — would seem to speak to both creative and financial desperation. Still, the first three movies were good fun and director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, 2008; The Batman, 2022), in the second and third installments, brought a level of cinematic sophistication and story-craft to bear that elevated the material beyond the sequel doldrums of derivativeness.

The big ask — presumption? — of this movie, then, is that we will accompany it "many generations" into the future of the Apes continuum, to a time when the teachings and motives of Caesar, the liberator and Ur-ape (whose body we witness lain atop its funeral pyre in the opening) have become the stuff of interpretation and schisms within the tribalized world of a post-human Earth. Even from its first moments, the movie feels both over-studied and under-developed.

In the current apedom, humanity lingers more as a mythic rumor than as a force for good or evil. Our protagonists, the mainly peaceful Eagle clan, refer to them as Echoes and avoid the valley that is their purported home, focusing instead on bonding with and raising birds of prey. But their idyll is disrupted by an invasion by an invasion by another, marauding clan and the discovery of a human in their midst.

With all his friends and family killed or enslaved by the followers of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a violent ideologue bent on reframing the wisdom of Caesar as a blueprint for domination, young Noa (Owen Teague) sets out on a journey of discovery with the reclusive Raka (Peter Macon) and a taciturn human named Mae (Freya Allen). Raka begins to educate Noa about the arcane written words of the humans, while Mae dispels long-held notions about the internal life of the world's surviving humans.

Which is all well and good, and the largely computer-generated vistas are quite a thing to behold. But as Noa and company draw closer to Proximus and his stronghold, the allegorical elements of the story overwhelm its sense of adventure, robbing the big climax of tension and release it requires to succeed.

As with so many things, it's entirely possible I am approaching Kingdom in bad faith, that as a casual appreciator of 21st century Apes-cinematic universe I should simply want to like this, rather than burdening it with expectations of fun or excitement. It does offer those things, albeit in miserly proportion to the story's sense of self-importance. Director Wes Ball (the Maze Runner franchise) creates an enveloping, rusting, overgrown world in which the action takes place, but I felt so little connection to the primary characters (species notwithstanding), that I needed more than pretty backdrops and prolonged climbing sequences to sustain my interest; it just wasn't there. PG13. 145M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.

THE IDEA OF YOU. So Michael Showalter, setting aside his brilliant work with The State (1995) and Stella (2005) and in Wet Hot American Summer (2001), has established himself as a director of quirky, sometimes challenging, often well-observed romantic comedies for almost 20 years now. He's also a professional academic (semiotics, I think) and a director for hire; sometimes the disparate elements do not necessarily cohere in the work. When it's good (The Baxter, 2005; The Big Sick, 2017), Showalter's stuff can remind us of a bygone era, when Elaine May or Peter Bogdanovich made funny-sad movies about relationships between adults. When it's not as good (The Lovebirds, 2020), it feels uncomfortably removed from its setting, a compromised vision.

In between are movies like Hello, My Name is Doris (2015) and The Idea of You, romantic comedies filled with strong performances and so many ideas about love and friendship and storytelling that maybe the movies can't contain them.

In this case, my wife looked over a number of times and asked if The Idea of You is actually good — fair question. I think it is, with Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine (as a 40-year-old single mom and a 24-year-old pop star who meet cute and then actually fall for each other) both giving honest-seeming, self-reflective performances as people struggling with the implications of a complicated relationship. But then there are the extended musical numbers by his band and sections of dialogue that seem like copies of copies of A.I.-generated soliloquies.

So it's not all great, but it is the sort of sweetly-sad movie seldom seen these days, and is even more seldom successful. And, in its ambitions to excavate the complexity of modern romance on an outsized stage, it does something bolder and more complex than most of what we see at the multiplex. R. 115M. PRIME.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.