It would be hard for the two movies I saw last week, Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, to exist at further ends of the cinematic spectrum. Evil Does Not Exist is a new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the writer and director of Drive My Car. It is a Japanese arthouse drama, and almost punishingly slow. If you’re inclined to like that sort of thing (I am), maybe you’d describe it as patient. “It’s boring,” I wrote in my notebook, a neutral acknowledgement of a seemingly objective truth rather than a complaint.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, is the fourth installment in the current iteration of a long-running blockbuster franchise. “Very excited to watch some apes beat the shit out of each other,” I texted a friend before heading into the theater. I got exactly what I wanted.
* * * * *
The slowness of Evil Does Not Exist is a lot to deal with. This is a movie with a 15- or 20-minute town hall meeting, and that’s arguably the most dynamic scene. I love a slow movie in a theater. Slow movies that should be snappy drive me nuts, but movies that have no intention of being anything other than a sensory bath are great excuses to relax in a distraction-free environment. I can let my thoughts off the leash to drift where they may. That’s often the point of slow movies.
In the midst of the many things that passed through my mind in the first forty or so minutes of Evil Does Not Exist, I spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. It felt intrusive, a distraction spurred by a coincidence. Evil Does Not Exist takes place during winter in a heavily-forested town. Everything is dusted with snow. The village of Mizubiki may be in rural Japan, but the way of life depicted didn’t look all that different from my childhood in the heavily-forested outskirts of Connecticut. An early scene in which Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) splits firewood and loads it into a wheelbarrow stirred up strong memories, memories that led me to think about the infrequency with which my childhood yard now likely sees any snow at all.
For a few minutes, I was worried this sudden focus was derailing my experience, but it quickly became clear I’d been played. Far from intrusive, thoughts of climate change had been cultivated. I got there via an unusually personal and immediate route, but Hamaguchi takes great pains throughout the first third of Evil Does Not Exist to establish the patterns of life in the village, and to get you thinking, on some level or another, about threats to those patterns. It’s hard to watch a man ladling water out of a creek without thinking about the fact that a lot of people can’t do that anymore. What once would have seemed quaint now seems precious.
* * * * *
The single aspect of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes that I found most remarkable was the physicality of the apes. I was always aware of their strength, in a sort of tactile way. “Can you imagine,” I thought to myself during an early fight scene, “getting punched by a gorilla who meant it?” Throughout all of the set pieces, the effects team and the animators in particular never lose sight of the weight of each hit. We are meant to marvel at them without ever feeling them to be fantastical. The power and presence of the apes reminded me of the day many years ago when I gazed in awe at the underwater scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio, processing the fact that Jiminy Cricket had weight.
The protagonist is Noa, a young chimpanzee on a mission to free his clan, who were all taken prisoner in a raid. Along the way, he encounters and befriends a human woman, Mae. Within the world of Apes, humans exist, but they are feral and pre- (well, strictly speaking, post-) verbal. The same virus that gave apes speech and intelligence, took them from humans. Mae is unusual. She can talk, fully fluent and cognitively unimpaired.
From that revelation, the movie loses its way a bit, sacrificing what it’s great at (world-building, mood, general vibes) for what it isn’t (plot and emotional payoff). Part of the reason it starts to wobble, I think, is because the creative team is never quite sure what they want to do with Mae. Is she the new audience surrogate, or are we supposed to dislike her? The movie itself seems unable to decide. It’s ambitious, and I like that the movie tries something, even if it doesn’t work. “The fact that she sucks is probably the most interesting thing about that movie,” a friend texted me after seeing the movie, and he’s right.
The movie ends with Noa and his tribe rebuilding their home, and Mae setting off to help humanity do the same. Before she goes, they have a final, standoffish conversation, during which Noa asks if humans and apes can ever live side-by-side. His question is hopeful, even if he asks it despairingly. He wants the answer to be yes.
There’s an insert shot there, brief enough that I almost missed it, of Mae holding a pistol behind her back. It is jarring, a fantastic and unexpected directorial choice. I love that shot, and how it collapses everything the movie has been struggling to articulate into a single frame. The gun is a visceral betrayal of Noa, who’s harmless, but we say that as the audience. The gut reaction of judging Mae is replaced almost instantaneously by self-reflection: Would you feel safe living side-by-side with these apes? Would you live with Noa? I realized in that moment that I wouldn’t. Because of the work that the production team put into making the chimps and gorillas—boy, that gorilla—feel real, I realized that I’d already known that for at least the last hour.