I've got some real mixed feelings about this one. Those past three movies were surprisingly good, and I was always skeptical about a fourth. The best thing I can say about the film (besides the special effects side of things) is that it does set itself a considerable amount of time later than the past three. How long isn't exactly clear, but it's good that these are new characters, and new conflicts, more or less.
As for the visuals, as mentioned before, it's all pretty good. It's hard to fault much by way of visual effects here, though there is a certain wow factor lacking. It's all very proficient and largely convincing, but it doesn't pop the way both the Avatar movies so far have, for example. Maybe you need a great filmmaker to know what to do with those visuals. The basics here are strong, because you do generally believe what you're seeing, but creatively, things aren't very inspired, especially when it comes to the action.
It's also too slow/long. To go back to Avatar, I didn't mind that last one being three hours. I wasn't bothered by the length of Babylon or Killers of the Flower Moon. But Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - on top of having too long a title - is too long a movie, I'd say by 40 to 50 minutes. It needed to be cut down, and it needed to introduce its main villain sooner.
There was only one character I really liked here, and that character wasn't in the movie enough. The protagonist is fine, the main villain is fine (once he finally shows up), and the way future sequels were set up was also fine. It's a fine movie. It's not great. It was too long. But there was enough here to prevent me from calling it bad... though it lacked a certain something to make it feel essential. I'm unsure whether I'll see the next one, to be honest.
As for the visuals, as mentioned before, it's all pretty good. It's hard to fault much by way of visual effects here, though there is a certain wow factor lacking. It's all very proficient and largely convincing, but it doesn't pop the way both the Avatar movies so far have, for example. Maybe you need a great filmmaker to know what to do with those visuals. The basics here are strong, because you do generally believe what you're seeing, but creatively, things aren't very inspired, especially when it comes to the action.
It's also too slow/long. To go back to Avatar, I didn't mind that last one being three hours. I wasn't bothered by the length of Babylon or Killers of the Flower Moon. But Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - on top of having too long a title - is too long a movie, I'd say by 40 to 50 minutes. It needed to be cut down, and it needed to introduce its main villain sooner.
There was only one character I really liked here, and that character wasn't in the movie enough. The protagonist is fine, the main villain is fine (once he finally shows up), and the way future sequels were set up was also fine. It's a fine movie. It's not great. It was too long. But there was enough here to prevent me from calling it bad... though it lacked a certain something to make it feel essential. I'm unsure whether I'll see the next one, to be honest.