Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Apes strong together... With Caesar's passing came the necessary long exposure. The new hero Noah, the new heroine Nova, and of course family and friends. Funny sequences about the foul odors of human females alternate with themes of artificial evolution. Knowledge and technology vs symbiosis with nature is beautifully sketched out and could use more elaboration, but there's no time. Wes Ball is building the fertile ground for a new trilogy and succeeds in presenting an interesting world that I want to know more about. A world that nature has taken back from humans and where the Legend of Caesar takes on a life of its own and is subjected to new interpretations. The apes, as a product of our failure, slowly tread our path, but have the ruins of our triumphs in their sights, which they want for themselves. I wonder where they'll take it. I'm sorry the smart people haven't disappeared. I'm waiting for the astronauts to arrive and visit New York. But this is missing the point. (2024-05-13)

I love this whole monkey franchise, I love Wes Ball and I love his Labyrinth films, so this was a clear guarantee of quality, which was confirmed from the first minutes. If something is flawless, it's the visuals of the whole film, because we get absolutely realistic monkeys, whose quality increases with every episode and this is probably the imaginary peak, it can’t get better than this. Then there is the excellent depiction of the colorful world around, the forests, nature, the eagles!! I have no words for this aspect of the film. Equally, I have to commend the story, which explains in the introduction where we've come since Caesar's time, and which solidly portrays the various current "factions" on the ground and who's really against who. So as a visual treat, along with the globe-trotting and unraveling of the story, the film is great. My only problem, though, which also puts me off the full score, is the lack of any major action, a grand finale or mass battle (which in previous films was almost always a big finale...), as well as the story being perhaps a little too forcefully directed towards that fateful rocket landing (which we all kind of saw coming), so the viewer actually probably knows roughly who's going to win, what's going to happen and how it's all going to end, which kind of spoils the surprise moment. Although the impression is overwhelmingly positive, the film is still lacking some more closure, a better villain or more fatality, so I guess we can only hope that Wes will take it properly and bring more carnage in the coming episodes. Oh, and I commend the eagles and the originality of that element, as they were really good. (2024-05-11)

A slick Hollywood adventure with nicely constructed ape characters featuring flawless digital rendering of their facial expressions. And a screenplay rich in plot development in a beautiful, varied setting. But toward the end, there are some things in it that don’t make sense, that don’t correspond to the preceding meticulous narrative and the building of relationships between the characters or their logical behaviour. It seems as if there wasn’t time to polish the last few pages of the script. (2024-06-05)

Caesar is dead, but his legacy lives on, albeit in a twisted form! Although I haven't seen War for the Planet of the Apes, I went to the cinema to see the latest entry in the post-apocalyptic ape saga, as it is a fresh reboot(?) of the franchise. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is another audiovisually captivating spectacle, standing out in particular for its amazing CGI apes. Story-wise, the film doesn't have much to surprise, but it was still very easy to watch thanks to the attractive visuals and the regularly dosed action. I was intrigued by the character of Raky and also by the line with the breeding of eagles (it reminded me of the ikrans from Avatar). I wonder if there will be a sequel in the coming years, which I certainly wouldn't be averse to. (2024-05-30)

A script that could easily have taken 100 minutes of running time. At least in the first third of the film, the heroes are sometimes groping in a breathtakingly made visual arrangement full of crumbled skyscrapers in an overgrown jungle, and it takes a hell of a long time before it starts to have any momentum and any systematic direction in which the new Apes want to go. The umpteenth sequel, which thankfully doesn't degrade in the style of Fast and Furious and other similar mega-sagas, but still maintains a spare, relatively minimalist storyline and very reasonable action that doesn't come at the expense of storytelling. The ending got it moving solidly, but it lacked top speed. Plus, in some moments, the filmmakers took strong inspiration from recent contributions to the Mad Max franchise. (2024-07-12)