“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form. As digital technology has improved film by film, to the point where the CGI chimps, gorillas and orangutans are more breathtakingly hyper-real than ever, the humans they’re replacing, both on the screen and in the future shock of the series’s storyline, have become increasingly two-dimensional. Between the coming of AI and a glance at the headlines, maybe we should just let the pixel monkeys take over for good.
