Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) - Movie Review

Apes franchise [Music] [Applause] strong what is up guys welcome to my review of kingdom of the Planet of the Apes this is the sequel the fourth film technically in the new rebooted phase of plan of the Apes films that started a little over a decade ago with rise of the plan of the Apes then dawn of the plan of the Apes one my favorite movies of all time and then concluding with War for the Planet of the Apes I believe in 2017 and after Disney acquired Fox plan of the Apes was one of the franchises that was listed out as being one of the properties that they were really planning on building out and doing more movies in and me like everybody else got very nervous about that at least cautiously optimistic where the three previous movies were so good there's no reason that we should doubt that creative team but at the same time that was such a perfect Trilogy of movies a perfect storyline that concluded that ended the story of Caesar it is hard to think of how the hell you could match that or even surpass that and for this film The directing duties go over to Wes ball who is famous for doing the Maze Runner Trilogy which I admittedly have never seen but have also never heard crazy good things about them so I was admittedly a little bit nervous about his name being on there too when you have somebody like Matt Reeves that just so perfectly did those last two movies and has now AC the way to do Batman any name was going to make me a little nervous but somebody that I don't have any experience with their work yeah I was uh I was trembling a little and one of the biggest questions that I as well as everybody else had is how are you going to continue this what characters are we going to focus on is this going to start to take place with Cornelius Caesar's son being the main character are we going to jump ahead in time are we going to reboot completely and essentially what they have done is they have kept those three films canonical but we have gone hundreds of years into the future where now Caesar's name his teachings his legacy his Legend has led to many different ape factions taking his word and having very different interpretations of it so there's people that that know very well what Caesar's intentions were and what his teachings were and what all of the things that he wanted the Apes to to do going forward were and then you have other factions that decide to twist his words and manipulate them for their own gain and we all experiened this through a ape named Noah so does this fourth film continue the trend of the greatness of the previous three films are we setting ourselves up in a good position to continue on with this franchise or do I wish they would have just left the trilogy alone let's get into it starting off with the positives I think they did a really good thing by deciding not to continue directly off of the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes not focusing on the rest of the surviving ape characters not focusing on Cornelius and jumping really far into the future because the interesting thing that that choice creates is that us as the audience members know all of the events of Rise Dawn and War we know everything that Caesar did we know everything that he intended to do we even know some of his shortcomings we are fully aware of that character and everything that character represented and now we are in a place in history of in the future of this Apes world where no nobody else has that information the viewers are ahead of everybody else in the movie but on the flip side of that we have hundreds of years missing so we are also playing catchup at the same time trying to figure out how this world has evolved how things have transpired since Caesar's death what the world looks like in relation to humans and apes and their relationship and so there's a good chunk of the movie that there's like this Intrigue and this mystery about how things have gone since the end of War for the Planet of the Apes and at the same time there is a bit of a switch where you have characters trying to discover things about Caesar and about the times of the past that we know full well what happened and so there's times where we're waiting for characters to catch up with us and so it's an interesting little Dynamic that the story Choice creates there I also think that the choice to focus in on how somebody's words and teachings and their Legend can be spun by different people uh it's not a movie that like overtly tries to commentate on anything modern but you could very easily see this translating over to things like religion or political figures where everybody hears the same things everybody hears the same dialogue or they read the same page but this group thinks of it as one thing and this group thinks of it as something else and I think that was a really interesting thing to explore here where you have some Apes that are very devout almost like a religion to Caesar and they're trying to keep all of his words pure and make sure that his word is survived throughout history as the way that it was intended to be and then you have other people namely the faction led by our villain here that are taking the same exact words but twisting it to something that he wants to accomplish and getting everybody to Rally behind him as like the second coming of Caesar and something that these Apes movies have always been able to do even back to the classic ones is they're always able to have this history repeating itself cycle to where the Apes start to outlive the humans and the humans no longer have control of the world but inevitably the Apes start to behave exactly like the humans were that led to their eventual downfall and it's just this constant vicious cycle and this is the first movie after the Apes have fully taken over in that original trilogy where we start to see that cycle come back again it pretty much goes without saying but I'm going say it anyway the CGI the motion capture the immersion of this movie is absolutely on par with the previous three I feel like this modern Apes franchise is pretty much like the gold standard as far as photo realistic CGI animals and even more so with performance capture I mean the fact that Andy Circus was not able to get something from the Academy Awards for what he did with especially Dawn and War for the plan of the Apes is just one of those cinematic crimes that is never going to feel just to me but all of these actors most of which are actors I'm not really familiar with this isn't necessarily a movie that's led by a quote unquote movie star they all do phenomenal here with all their different characters and all the different performances here Kevin Durant doing a great job as uh proximus the main villain here and very different type of villain as well he's not a mustache twirling villain he's not somebody that rules with you know just constant murder or gigantic muscle he's somebody that has Charisma and kind of has this this jovial appeal to him where you could see other a getting behind him and thinking this guy's great this guy's he's the one that I should be following there there could be nothing evil in in his motivations and then you start to learn more about his character and what his actual motivations are and what he wants to gain and how he wants his legacy and Caesar's Legacy to evolve through him and it's like oh yeah this dude's a [ __ ] [ __ ] what a wonderful day and in a year where just a couple of weeks ago we got Kevin Durant being an absolute standout in Abigail this is just one of those years years for him him and Dan Stevens having a hell of a 2024 but at no point in this movie did anything break the immersion the entire time I feel like I'm watching actual Apes I I'm watching real things happening there's never a point where that's broken there's never a point where I start to doubt things or there's an uncanny valley or there's maybe a a high octane sequence where the CGI starts to get a little bit muddy they did a perfect job and while I don't think it's quite as standout as the score for the previous three films I did like the score here as well anytime that you are able to kind of evoke emotions with just the music and just tell us everything that we need to know about how we're supposed to feel about a scene through the music I think that's a good score even moments where you get that classic Planet of the Apes music that's kind of fed into the score that's also really nostalgic and cool for me so good job on the score and finally I really appreciated their use of humor here I don't think that it was too much I don't think that it was an inappropriate times there is really well-placed humor in the previous films like even the darkest one which is War for the Planet of the Apes you have characters like bad ape that seriously breaks the tension in really good moments uh you have moments like that in this film where they got a good laugh out of me and in a world that's post a lot of Disney Marvel humor where it kind of just is just way too much and it's kind of cringey through most of it I appreciate when a filmmaker is able to utilize humor in the way that it should be utilized now moving on to the mixed aspect and the main one here is the character of May who is your lead human character and this is the female character that's gotten a lot of focus in the marketing and I'm not going to speak too much about this character's placement in the story because I want everybody to walk in as I did which is knowing little to nothing but I'll just say her character is very intentionally used to get a very complicated emotion out of the viewer there's certain things about what she wants and what she wants to do that you can get behind in lie of her being a human and uh team human forever and also because of the nature of how the Apes have grown to kind of be tyrants in certain parts of this world but also there's things about her because you really sympathize and identify with a lot of the Apes characters namely the protagonist ones that there's certain aspects of her character that kind of makes you feel like you don't like her so much and I think that's by Design I think it's a character that we're going to see more of and that's going to continue to evolve as we see more of her but by the end of the film there was so much about her that I had questions about there was so much about what she did that I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it and again I think that's by Design but I don't know if it completely came together for me I like to kind of have a little bit more of a handle on how I feel about certain characters by the end of a film now moving on to the negatives and let me get this out of the way this is not as good as the previous three Apes films but that is a very high bar I really enjoyed this film I think I think that it's a very good continuation I'm very excited about where things are going to go and I will absolutely be there day one whenever we get the followup to this film inevitably but it doesn't hold a candle to the previous three so don't walk in with that expectation I didn't walk in with that expectation I was able to have a very good experience but if you walk in thinking this has got to be as good as Dawn this has got to be as good as War otherwise what's the point you're going to be let down and the main thing for me that keeps it from being on the level of those previous three films for my own taste is that I don't feel like the characters here are nearly as strong as the characters that we got in the previous three namely Caesar which again is a very high bar I think there's a solid argument that Andy circus's Caesar is the greatest movie character that has dawned the screen in the past decade so again having that as your bar as it's got to be that good otherwise I'm upset I didn't walk in with that but you have the character of Noah who is very much just kind of like this younger naive um Adventure hungry character that there's a little bit of an aspect of a Revenge tale there's a little bit of an aspect of coming of age and he's just somebody that we get to experience this world through he's not as dominating of a character as Caesar and even the side characters I don't feel like the side characters in here are nearly as interesting as characters like Maurice or rocket or even on the villainous side of Koba Koba was just such a standout character and a standout performance by Toby keble that that as great as Kevin Durant is his character of proximus pales in comparison to Koba so I I do like the characters here but I think that was the main aspect for me throughout the 2 and 1 half hour run time where I felt like there was a bit of a missing edge here a character that I just really get sucked into there's also a bit of an awkward pacing to this film and I don't know exactly how they would have been able to get around it because they did choose to have that two 300E time Gap so some of it's kind of just going to be unfortunately a a nature of the Beast it's a bit of a side effect to having such a good Direction with their story the first 30 to 40 minutes of this film is just focused on kind of introducing us or reintroducing US rather to this world and how this world now looks and how this world now works and how these different factions of Apes run and so it's a good hour or so before you really start to understand what the main conflict what the main plot of the film is actually going to be and even after that gets going there's a segment of the movie where we've reached our destination by the second act and the movie slows down yet again because there's not really anything in here in the story that has like this heightened tension or this ticking time element or anything that's nearly as intense as the events of the previous three films where you really feel like things are ratcheting up you feel like there is tensions Brewing there is something that's going to happen something's going to snap something's going to explode you just don't really have that aspect to this movie so it's very much more of like an Adventure film where you're just discovering this world and discovering how this world works with a little bit of conflict thrown in and for a 2 and 1 half hour film I was never bored I was never impatient I was totally sucked in but it did feel like it bogged down a little bit in that First Act and then bogg down yet again between the second and the third act and this really isn't a negative on the movie it's just kind of one final thought in regards to my feelings on how the film worked I do think that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is going to function much better once we have other parts of the story maybe just one more film maybe the completed Trilogy that I'm sure they're planning this is one of those introductory chapters that I think does a good job at bringing us back and does a good job at laying the foundation of where they want to go in further stories but I think it's going to work better over time it's going to age better when we see where a lot of the things are set up in this film eventually go so all in all guys I really enjoyed this I'm looking forward to the future of this franchise I think that it's still very consistently good and if you feel the way that I do about those previous three films and you have them on a certain amount of a pedestal try your best to walk in not expecting this movie to meet that pedestal and you'll enjoy it and there's some of you that might actually enjoy this story more than one or two or even all three of the previous films but try not to walk in with that expectation you'll have a good time well that's it for this one guys if you enjoyed that please click over here for all of my 2024 new release reviews I'm also going to put my ranking of the Planet of the Apes films from like 6 years ago up here and this weekend I'm going to release an updated ranking so I'll try to switch it out for that when I get to it like share hit the Subscribe button so you don't miss that video here in a couple of days and as always remember opinions are like [ __ ] but that doesn't mean you have to be

Channel: Cody Leach

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Keywords: Cody Leach, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Review, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 2024, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Out of Theater Reaction, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 2024 Reaction, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes movie reaction, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes movie review, Planet of the Apes, Planet of the Apes Review, Planet of the Apes 2024, Kingdom of Planet of the Apes, Kingdom Planet of the Apes

Id: tRrc02lBm-M

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024