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

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the newest entry in the series and is directed by Wes Ball who you may remember from such films as the Maze Runner series, many generations have passed since the death of Caesar (Andy Serkis) at the end of 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes and Apes now rule the Earth with humanity regressing to a primitive state but a young Ape named Noa (Owen Teague) must travel beyond his village home when his clan is captured in a raid and what he finds will open his eyes to the world beyond.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a movie that when I was watching it I was really enjoying it but the more I’ve sat with it it has faded for me a little bit, now this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie because it isn’t, it was just another film that I liked and then that was it for me.

Firstly the Visual Effects work here is remarkable, the way the performance capture work and the locations blend together is near seamless, I saw an interview with Wes Ball a while back where he talked about one of his big influences on this movie being the Avatar series from James Cameron and that influence shows here as you really believe the world of the film your in.

And the other part of this is what I call the scale framing, the way the 2.35:1 aspect ratio is used here to frame the locations is terrific as they are framed in the film in a way that makes you believe that the characters are looking at the locations the way you yourself might look at them with the human eye like how you view a great vista from on high or a sunset or how you look up at a building or a clifface or forest of trees, scale framing is very important and most movies don’t put a lot of effort into it being memorable but this movie does.

This movie also has some good performances in it as well, Owen Teague is good as Noa and he holds your attention well for the screen time he has, Peter Macon is also very good as Raka one of the few to really remember Caesar’s teachings from the 2010’s trilogy of Apes films while Kevin Durand is a good villain in Proximus the leader of the masked clan who want to be the dominant Ape tribe.

But this movie is also too long for me, the film runs for 140 minutes but it felt like a long 2 and a half hours and because of that I also felt that the storytelling felt a little stretched and had the film been around the 110 to 120 minute mark I think it would’ve been a much better film with a tighter pace to make its storytelling feel punchier and more focused.

And so that was the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and it’s a solid entry that doesn’t match the 1968 original or even the 2010’s trilogy but it won’t make a monkey out of you, 3 out of 5.