Features

‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Reveals New Images!! Check It Out!!

A new adventurous era awaits the long-running Planet of the Apes franchise next year with the release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. To prepare viewers for what’s to come, Empire Magazine released a new still and concept art from the much-anticipated sci-fi sequel spotlighting the new hero ape Noa (Owen Teague) and his Orangutan ally Raka (Peter Macon) as they face the dangers nature has in store for them. Their journey will take them across verdant lands and violent river rapids as they look to steer ape-kind on the ideal course originally planned for them by Caesar (Andy Serkis).

Noa will follow in the footsteps of the history-defining Caesar before him as he begins to question the direction of the apes amid the rise of the tyrannical Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Atop a horse and with a weapon at his side in the still image, he has the confident appearance of a leader capable of winning freedom for everyone. The concept art, however, teases one of the more treacherous scenes viewers can expect these new apes to face. Raka shows his bravery as he reaches out from a bridge to save an ape, presumably Noa, and a human caught in a net suspended over vicious rapids. It’s an indication of how the film plans to explore new environments not seen in previous Apes films and an even greater lean toward action and adventure.

Director Wes Ball said he initially pitched his sequel as an ape-centric take on Apocalypto, Mel Gibson‘s 2006 film about a Mesoamerican hunter-turned-hero who sees his village razed and tribesmen captured by Mayan invaders and led across the treacherous jungle of 1500s Yucatán for a mass human sacrifice. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes shares some similarities to that story – Noa evolves into a hero throughout his quest and fights to save both his clan, which was taken by the cult-like Proximus Caesar, and all apes – but the main goal for Ball was to capture the emotional, pulse-pounding tone of the film. Since it’s set hundreds of years after the original Caesar, the director wants to play around with the story and Noa, who’s still very new to this world. Ball‘s production partner Joe Hartwick explained to Empire how the film will feel different from the Caesar trilogy thanks to its shift to a new lead:

“The last couple of movies concerned Caesar’s burden. Much like The Dark Knight, they felt heavy – super-enjoyable, but super-intense. We’re going in a different direction. Noa still has a burden, but it’s wrapped in a different level of adventure, mostly because the character hasn’t been exposed to the outside world before. So we’re seeing him see the world for the first time.”

‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Promises Action of Biblical Proportions

The river rapids sequence is just one of several massive action setpieces Ball and company have planned for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. VFX supervisor Erik Winquist says the film will take a page from the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes with a human hunt as well as a scene he told Empire was “a big, cataclysmic biblical kind of event.” Creating these scenes means pushing motion capture and VFX to their limits to ensure the apes and each sequence they’re in look realistic, something Winquist says became a nightmare when wet fur was involved. He hopes the team takes everything they learned from the visually stunning Avatar: The Way of Water to reach similar heights with the apes.

Freya Allan, Eka Darville, Willam H. Macy, Travis Jeffery, Neil Sandilands, Sara Wiseman, Lydia Peckham, Ras-Samuel Weld A’abzgi, and Dichen Lachman round out the cast of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes which is due out in theaters on May 24. Check out our full guide here for everything we know so far about the much-anticipated sequel. See the new images from Empire above.

 

via Collider

Leave a Reply