It should be noted that I’m not the biggest fan of the Planet of the Apes franchise. I’ve never seen the originals, or the Burton remake, but I have seen the reboot trilogy. Of those three, I only really liked Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, so I wasn’t in any huge rush to see the next entry in the franchise. But Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now available on Disney+ so I was able to check it out. So, how did this entry fair for a non-fan of the franchise?

The plot takes place some generations after the Caesar trilogy and now the apes live in many different tribes across the country. The hero of our story, Noa, is part of the clan of falcon-loving apes, is about to undertake a coming-of-age ceremony where he’s tasked with finding his own falcon egg in order to bond with the baby chick when his clan is attacked by a warrior based tribe of apes. Noa then his the road and eventually joins up with an orangutan named Raka, and a human named Mae, to rescue his clan from the power-hungry Proximus, who has taken Caesar’s doctrine and warped and corrupted it, resulting in a society where Apes and humans are not living side by side.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, yes, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes looks amazing. Using motion capture and green screen courtesy of Wētā FX, the film’s apes are damn-near photorealistic, with believable and convincing facial expressions that humanize the otherwise CG leads.

Whereas Dawn and War of the Planet of the Apes were labelled as “thinking man action movies”, Kingdom doesn’t really deserve this label. It’s very much Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey and there’s not much complexity involved in the characterization. While the VFX on the apes are so lifelike, they’re fairly two-dimensional on paper, with the supporting cast there largely to service Noa’s journey.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is also two and a half hours long and when you don’t really care about the characters, it really starts to show. I paused the movie ninety minutes in and honestly thought I was near the end, only to see I still had almost an hour left in the runtime. It really started to feel like a slog to finish.

I’d say if you’re a fan of the Apes franchise, you’ll probably enjoy this one in some capacity, but I don’t feel the need to ever come back to this one, nor am I hoping for a direct sequel with these characters. A technical Marvel but that’s about it.