Caesar’s legacy is very much alive in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
The Planet of the Apes franchise continues next weekend with the big screen debut of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, director Wes Ball’s first film in the series. This next chapter of the story follows a trilogy of films centered around the character of Caesar, an ape played by Andy Serkis that lead a revolution and changed the world for his kind. This new movie takes hundreds of years after Caesar’s leadership, but some of his lessons remain in the form of fables and almost religious teachings.
Peter Macon plays a character named Raka in Kingdom, an ape who is something of a historian and clings tightly to what he believes were Caesar’s ideals. Speaking to ComicBook ahead of the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes premiere, Macon opened up about the connections to Caesar.
“There was only so much that was actually useful in the other films, in what Caesar was,” Macon told us. “The ‘apes shall not kill apes, apes together strong, and apes and humans live side by side.’ Because the idea that stories and fables tend to outlive the truth. They tend to get morphed, the truth get morphed into stories and fables as we tell them generation after generation after generation. So for many generations, Caesar’s legacy, the roots of what he was about, when I would go back and watch the other films, that’s the only thing that Raka would be privy to. What survived, his manifesto, his philosophy. So then, taking him being like an archeologist and unearthing human artifacts and different things and just piecemeal his own story together. He does present a very different world view from Noah and Proximus, in that he’s aware there are other clans out there. Proximus is aware that there are other clans out there, Noah is not. So he falls in the middle of that, but he’s still trying to figure it out himself. No one really knows the truth of anything because it was so long ago. So they’re kind of piecing it together.
“That was useful and then I had to sort of make it all up, backstory wise, and check in with the writers and with Wes to make it all fall into some vague sense of order. And I think at the end of the day that’s the best thing because it leaves the audience with room to sort of think about and figure stuff out, too.”
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set to arrive in theaters on May 10th.
