He’s a goofy little ape in a puffer vest, and he’s giving us a thumbs-up. This was just a small moment of levity in an otherwise grim and operatic film, the 2017 epic “War for the Planet of the Apes.” But it stuck with me. In the midst of a dire war for the fate of humanity, we watch this misfit creature amble into the frame, dwarfed by a magisterial orangutan on one side and the stately ape revolutionary Caesar on the other, both preparing for battle. He turns to Caesar for approval, waits for an awkward beat and flashes his thumbs-up. I cannot overstate how charming it is.
Up to that point, the new “Planet of the Apes” movies had mostly been Caesar’s show, with two films focused on his journey from laboratory animal to building a peaceful simian civilization in California’s Muir Woods. The films follow his evolution patiently — in part, perhaps, because they are following the steps of an actor’s process. Caesar is a digitally rendered ape, but he is played, via performance-capture technology, by Andy Serkis, the man whose bravura turn as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films elevated him to become more or less the Laurence Olivier of motion-capture acting. Some 10 years later, Caesar was Serkis’s opportunity to build a mo-cap character from scratch in front of an audience, proving just how well an actor could translate legible humanity to a CGI animal. Part of what’s so remarkable about the 2010s “Apes” films was how much they conditioned viewers to thrill at close-ups of this chimpanzee’s eyes, the performance of impossible consciousness behind them.
So it was a big deal when Steve Zahn, playing that goofy little ape, snatched his own small moment. The first thing that stood out was its physicality — a wholly digital creature exhibiting unmissably human comic timing. Second was the playfulness: All this technology was being marshaled not for some action sequence or alien vista but for one funny monkey. What was most incredible, though, was its sheer ordinariness as a piece of film acting. Zahn strolled into a series dominated by Serkis’s performance and made one little attention-grabbing gesture — the sort of thing that usually happens organically, between humans on a film set. Yet here it was, rendered in pixels, gesture by gesture: The simple miracle of a stolen scene.
The entire recent “Apes” universe, from 2011 onward — which now includes this month’s new “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” — was designed to let this kind of high-tech realism thrive. The films shoot partly on location, rather than using totalizing digital environments. They’re chockablock with action, but their most compelling work takes place in intimate conversation, ape to ape. Between the digital disposability of Marvel’s multiverse and the paint-by-numbers CGI smoothing of seemingly everything on Netflix, the “Apes” films remind us that we once imagined a more humane future for these tools — the re-creation of reality, rather than its replacement. To save cinema from oblivion, maybe we should take another look at the mo-cap actor.
You’ll already know motion capture, or performance capture: It’s that thing where actors typically wear ridiculous bodysuits and get covered with little dots, so their movements can be recorded and then applied to computer-generated 3-D figures. When this technology emerged in the movies around the start of this century, it was by turns revelatory and embarrassing. For every Davy Jones — Bill Nighy’s menacing octopus pirate from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — there was some unholy nightmare like Tom Hanks in “Polar Express” or Jar Jar Binks, paragliding through the uncanny valley.
But a high standard was set early on by the 2002 appearance of Gollum. He was one of the first CGI characters to be rendered by way of real-time motion capture. He also represented a change in the way the technology was presented to the audience. As Tanine Allison, a scholar of visual effects, has written, throughout their numerous collaborations, Jackson and Serkis promoted their work by talking about its authenticity. They invoked cinematic tradition. Serkis alluded to the Method and presented motion capture not as part of a director or an effects artist’s tool kit but as something that might become part of an actor’s. In interviews, he often “did” Gollum, his own posture and voice melting away so journalists could see just how directly the actor’s performance animated the creature onscreen. (There’s a viral clip from this month of Kevin Durand, who plays the main villain in “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” doing much the same on a talk show.)
After Gollum, motion capture became ubiquitous. But Serkis remained its Barnumesque showman, and the “Apes” films served as the vehicle for his star turn. He and the studio campaigned hard in the press for recognition; there have been innumerable articles about why Serkis deserved an Academy Award, why performance capture was the future of film, how an industry that didn’t consider that sort of thing “acting” was living in denial. The Oscar push rekindled, reliably, for every one of the three “Apes” films in which he starred.
I used to be annoyed by this. (Sure, Serkis is good, but if Amy Adams and Paul Giamatti can’t win Oscars with their own faces. …) Over the years, though, I’ve become a convert — not necessarily to the tech-utopian aura surrounding digital effects but to the argument Serkis and his allies have been making. He is perhaps the first and last actor to insist upon performance-capture acting as a vocation, as opposed to an expedient effect. And the “Apes” franchise remains one of the last big-budget holdouts to try and preserve the reality and magic of the physical world amid all the effects. The focus, in each film, remains on the correspondence between those digital ape faces and the underlying humanity of the actors — a metaphorical and literal connection that’s central to the films’ entire meaning. It’s not simply that Serkis’s or Zahn’s or Durand’s electric performances are better than a lot of their acoustic peers’. It’s that films based around performances like these are better films.
There’s no Andy Serkis in “Kingdom,” which is set long after Caesar’s death. But it stays true to the legacy of Serkis/Caesar — anchoring its characters in close-ups, the apes communicating with their gestures, their hoarse whispers and, of course, their eyes.
The scene in which this feels most pointed takes place in the ruins of what appears to be Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The young chimp protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), stumbles upon the structure alongside the silent, feral human girl who has become his travel companion. He is befuddled by the giant cantilevered tube in the center of the building; we watch him size it up, handling the viewfinder without understanding it. Eventually he leans down to the lens, and we see him in extreme close-up as the celestial spectacle he’s beholding illuminates his face. (We never see what he sees.) His features go slack, then alert with astonishment. Soon we get the same shot of the human girl looking through the telescope. Spot the difference, the film dares us.
Later, Noa shares his discovery with another ape, his language echoing the way humans might once have described the new medium of film. (He calls the contraption a “tunnel that eats light.”) But he is even more amazed by the way his companion viewed it. The apes had assumed this human to be incapable of higher brain function, but she registered the same awe Noa did. “She reacted,” he marvels, “as ape would.” Just imagine: A human actor’s reaction shot was loaded with all the same expressive detail and texture as that of a computer-generated ape. The wonders never cease.
Phillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.