The rebooted Planet Of The Apes series looks perpetually forward to an uncertain future

With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.

20th Century Fox no longer exists. The entity that spent decades as one of Hollywood’s major studios is now just a division of Disney, which purchased Fox’s film company in 2019 and has since used the label, now renamed 20th Century Studios, to brand some movies sent straight to Hulu and occasionally release genre movies in theaters. As it happens, Disney’s summer lineup for 2024 depends largely on remnants of Fox, with a new Alien movie, a Deadpool sequel that will presumably serve as a curtain call for Fox’s X-Men movies, and a new installment in the Planet Of The Apes series. Bob Iger recently assured investors that Fox will not necessarily play such a huge role in Disney’s future release schedules. Not to worry, Iger seemed to be saying; we see one of the major Hollywood players of the past century as no more than a well of IP that can be occasionally tapped, and there’s no danger that we’ll foolishly continue Fox’s rich past history of musicals, westerns, noir, or original horror. (Well, maybe on Hulu. Who knows what goes on there?) In this context, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes looks like a wormhole into Fox’s past.

The original Planet Of The Apes movies helped to establish Fox as a home for sci-fi, predating even their distribution of the Star Wars movies, and the series used their decreasing budgets and levels of prestige to smuggle in some provocative sci-fi ideas, with quintuple-feature marathons in theaters and on TV assuring that the apes would have a surprisingly formidable cultural footprint. It made sense, then, that in the wake of Star Wars, Alien, Predator, and various James Cameron projects, the studio would want to revive the franchise. Various actors and filmmakers shuffled on and off various Planet Of The Apes projects for years, stalling out off and eventually on screen: Tim Burton’s 2001 redo made a ton of money but didn’t satisfy audiences enough to justify a sequel. (“Made a ton of money but didn’t inspire a sequel” now sounds like its own brand of sci-fi.)

A decade later, however, Fox brought the property back from the brink, and that rebooted series is now four movies in, with a fifth seeming likely, and the possibility of surpassing the original movies in sight. (In terms of numbers, anyway.) With Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, the first entry under Disney’s reign, the apes now wander the ruined post-apocalyptic remains of their parent company. Though it’s comforting to see a form of Fox still making Aliens and Predators and Apes, it’s hard to say whether this counts as a victory.

Certainly Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is a lavish spectacle, mixing some seemingly real locations with a cast made up primarily of motion-capture animated characters so convincing you may forget to drop your jaw over the course of 150 minutes. It’s a long way, in other words, from Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, the 2011 movie that restarted the series without its best-known twist. At the close of the 1968 original, Charlton Helton’s astronaut character discovers that he hasn’t crash-landed on a distant planet, but rather Earth in the distant future, after mankind has wrecked things up real good, ensuring their replacement by super-intelligent primates. (Not to be outdone, the movie’s somehow-G-rated sequel manages to wreck the planet even more.) Kingdom even addresses some of that uncomfortable push-pull—the way the humans’ gradual social loss to the apes nags at them as unnatural, as somehow unfair.

The Burton movie still monkeyed around with time-travel, and produced a less strictly logical but admirably gobsmacking final twist, which most people seemed to hate (or at least find deeply confusing). So what the hell was left for poor Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to do—and set in the present day, no less? Screenwriters Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, alongside director Rupert Wyatt, took cues from Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, the terrific fourth movie in the old series, and reinterpreted some of that film’s events with a more grounded approach that also likely doubled as a more cost-effective one. Like Fox’s first X-Men movie 11 years earlier, Rise runs well under two hours—closer to 90 minutes when you take out the extensive end credits—and seemed, at the time, to inspire uncertainty in its parent company. (This kind of thing is typically consigned to hazy film-critic memories, but most press screenings for Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes happened about 48 hours before opening, not typically a sign of confidence.) These constraints also, like that first X-Men movie, give Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes an urgency that differentiates it from other movies like it.

Rupert Wyatt hasn’t gained much fanboy stature in the years since Rise, but his Apes picture really moves: His handheld camerawork is immediate without becoming ostentatiously shaky, locations and time periods shift with brisk dissolves, and there’s similar fluidity to his action-thriller filmmaking, carrying the movie from human story to ape story—and from science drama to prison-break to full-city riot. The humans-to-apes transition has a surprising kick that echoes the trick of the original film: We start out following a chemist (James Franco, seemingly unsure of how to do much besides affect a look of consternation) attempting to develop a cure for his dementia-stricken father (John Lithgow, a lucky break for the movie to have on hand), which involves secretly rescuing a lab chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis via mo-cap) and raising him as kind of a hybrid pet and son. When Caesar is taken from his family and locked away, he devises an escape—just as the Simian Flu that enhances apes’ intelligence takes hold of humanity.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes takes humankind from what looks like our world to what looks like, well, our world a decade later—on the brink of pandemic disaster—over the course of a compact running time, all while developing Caesar and several of his ape compatriots as (mostly) non-speaking characters. Wyatt still finds time for stylish touches, like how the fakeness of Caesar’s ape-shelter habitat feels reminiscent of a movie soundstage, providing an extra burst of exhilaration when Caesar busts out through the rooftop into the nighttime. Rather than turning Planet Of The Apes chintzily “realistic,” the movie uses that kinda-sorta realism to make its leaps feel weightier and more momentous. When Caesar makes his first guttural cry of “NO!”—a much-referred-to event from the earlier series—it’s still a chill-inducing moment, even after so many sequels where Caesar and other apes chat at length.

Continuing the X-Men parallels, the immediate Apes sequels, stately and handsome as they are under the direction of Matt Reeves, have a little trouble recapturing that momentum, and sometimes threaten to sink under their own weighty tastefulness. (OK, the tastefulness part is not really part of the X-Men deal, but that first X-movie has a charm that sometimes eludes its more impressive sequels.) Their use of Fox’s beloved Canadian Forest locations is evocative, sure—more like the moody The Wolverine than the wandering-around X-Men: The Last Stand—but it’s not as much fun as watching apes turn San Francisco into an impromptu battleground. The older series may have faced diminished budgets as they went on; the third one saves money (and avoids a seemingly dead end to the previous installment) by importing a few apes to contemporaneous San Francisco. But Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, for example, takes place in a distant science-fiction society despite the corners cut on makeup and effects. Kingdom, the new post-Reeves installment, gets a little closer to that otherworldliness, and with CG that hasn’t diminished in quality—but it’s still lots of fields and trees.

That’s not just an aesthetic drawback. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and War For The Planet Of The Apes both suffer a little from the endless prequelizing that plagued so many 2010s-era series, from James Bond to Star Trek to, yes, the X-Men again. Most of these movies are entertaining and well-made on their own, but collectively, they start to feel like a recent Film Twitter meme, repeating we are so back ad nauseam as they promise that now, finally, at the end of the movie, here is the James Bond/U.S.S. Enterprise/super-team/planet of hyper-intelligent apes that you’ve been waiting for.

Bafflingly, Dawn—the worst offender as a redundant prequel—seems to be the consensus choice for the best of the new series. But what actually happens in it? Some important stuff, of course: A further rift develops between Caesar and angrier, abused lab ape Koba; Koba destroys a fragile peace between factions of men and apes through trickery; Caesar tries to quell the conflict by eventually killing Koba, something that will haunt him, particularly as it ultimately fails to put a stop to the carnage in War. Beyond the notion that Caesar is haunted by the thought of becoming Koba, though, does anything that happens in War For The Planet Of The Apes really not make sense without Dawn’s supposed groundwork? (Most bizarre is the filmmakers’ decision to hold back on the apes’ speaking, a decision that pays great dramatic dividends in Rise and far less in the movies that are about an army of super-intelligent apes that already exists.)

Logistics aside, Dawn—which is, to be clear, a compelling and well-made movie with some stunning visual effects—also feels the most insular of the new series, the least concerned with posing sci-fi questions. Maybe this is because it’s so lopsided between dull human characters who get substantial screen time, and apes treated with too much restraint. War For The Planet Of The Apes, the most purely beautiful of the four, better recalls the eclecticism of the original series, which in turn leads it out of a self-prequelizing, character-motivation-obsessed cul-de-sac. The first half of the movie has Western undertones, positioning Caesar as a Clint Eastwood figure, leading a small band of apes (and one mute human child) on a mission of revenge (against the colonel who killed Caesar’s wife and older son) that turns into a greater-good rescue. The North American landscape has become a newly desolate frontier, and there’s a sense of Caesar wondering (though not quite verbalizing) if the amazing evolutionary leaps he’s made will ultimately be for naught, as easy to decivilize as any human.

If there’s nothing quite as provocative as the uprising in Conquest or as ambiguous as the ending of Battle For The Planet Of The Apes, Reeves’ films nonetheless find elegiac beauty in mankind’s weaknesses, and in apekind’s struggles to overcome them. Serkis and the animators gives perhaps their best performance as Caesar in War, managing to affect an Eastwoodian sneer through the face of a photorealistic simian, while Caesar’s longtime right-hand ape Maurice (Karin Konoval) and newcomer Bad Ape (Steve Zahn and also an adorable hat and puffer jacket combo) make for the most focused ensemble of the series.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes has no such familiar CG faces to fall back on; with it, the series makes an overdue jump into the future, “many generations” after Caesar’s quiet death at the end of War. Noa (Owen Teague) lives with his fellow apes in a peaceful settlement that focuses on training birds, but the appearance of the human Mae (Freya Allan) opens up a new world—not just of humans who may not all be as feral as the remaining victims of the mutated Simian Flu, but of a more aggressive and heavily populated ape clan led by Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who has appropriated the freedom fighter’s image and reputation for his own purposes. Essentially, we’re still circling Battle For The Planet Of The Apes territory. (Admittedly, pulling either a Beneath or an Escape would, at this point, require a level of chutzpah that any franchise filmmaker may be contractually required to have surgically removed.)

Kingdom feels like a bigger Apes movie, and though director Wes Ball brings a little of his kinetic Maze Runner sequel scrappiness to scenes of apes running, ducking, and dodging each other’s weapons, he obviously feels some debt to the Reeves version of the series. Impressively, this is even less of an action picture than the earlier trilogy, which included some dynamite sequences of armed conflict. There’s some of that here, but many of the best scenes involve simple exploration, like a short, wordless sequence where Noa discovers a gigantic telescope, or the scenes where loner ape Raka (Peter Macon) attempts to impart the “real” teachings of Caesar to Noa. It’s exciting to acclimate to the new Earth status quo only to see Noa’s world broadened. And it’s impressive as ever to marvel at just how much of that world is created through visual effects, with hybrid actor-and-animator performances that remain at the forefront of how those effects can push beyond mere spectacle. It may not be as bonkers as Fox’s Avatar series, but by this point, there are probably fewer human bodies logging screen time.

By the standards of contemporary franchises, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is a summer-movie triumph, even if it has some of the blurred-edge backgrounds and overcast skies that plague so many digital-first blockbusters. Why, then, does it still sometimes feel as if something is missing from this series, despite budgets and running times that don’t diminish at the same rate as its less prestigious 1970s-era predecessors?

A clue may come in the newest installment, where apes and, yes, a few humans repeatedly argue about nothing less than the trajectory of the planet, and whether any of the groups in the film are capable of taking the apes’ inheritance of the world as a just one. Thinking otherwise, one character opines, amounts to yearning for “a past that can never come back,” which doubles as a succinct description of the whole forever-franchise situation we find ourselves in at present, then triples as an explanation of why the new movie in particular sometimes feels more interested in a perpetual-motion, sequel-seeding plot than undiluted sci-fi imagination. The 13-year-old Rise has more accidental currency with our current pandemic era, while Kingdom’s take on how we pass along our beliefs, and whether peaceful coexistence is possible, lands somewhere between ambivalent (fair enough) and noncommittal (franchises, baby!).

The truth is, recapturing the past is damn near impossible—even if it’s relatively recent. The current Apes series began production long before Disney entered the picture, but there may always be something ersatz about Planet Of The Apes becoming a signature franchise meant to simulate the old 20th Century Fox for a new parent company. At the same time, it’s not easy to let go of such a storied institution, is it? Entry for entry, Planet Of The Apes has a strong hit rate in both incarnations: The weakest entries of the first five still take some major swings, and the new four are crafted with care. (Burton’s one-off, well, the makeup and performances underneath it make it a watchable screw-up.) Kingdom sets up a world of additional possibilities, even if the new series still feels unwilling to paint itself into the kind of crazy corners the older movies did. They avoid wild tonal shifts and time-looping craziness, indicating a surprising amount of discipline for a franchise four entries deep. This discipline also means that, so far, the Apes movies at least do us the courtesy of perpetually looking forward into an uncertain future. Just like us.

Final ranking:

1. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)

2. War For The Planet Of The Apes (2017)

3. Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (2024)

4. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (2014)