I love the Planet of the Apes franchise, including the Tim Burton iteration. And I’ve enjoyed them all, to be clear, I don’t remember much of the animated series from when I was a kid, or the brief live-action series, but I know the rest of franchise.

I was initially unsure about the Dawn/Rise/War trilogy but came around to them, and was curious as to when we would start to see more connective tissue tying us back into the original film. There is some of that in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but the movie itself feels a little overlong and doesn’t have quite the sense of adventure and character as the Caesar Trilogy had.

Set generations after the events of the last film (press materials say three hundred years, but it’s never mentioned in the narrative) we are introduced to Noa (Owen Teague) a young chimp who ends up on a life-changing adventure when a violent group of gorilla’s perverting Caesar’s teachings wipe out his village.

He discovers a human who can speak, Nova (Freya Allen) and finds himself drawn into conflict with Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).

It ends up being a solid and beautiful looking film. It garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, and while they are stunning, I could never quite believe that these chimps, and the rest of the simians were anything but fantastic performances encompased in computer generated and digital images.

It has a good narrative, and Noa goes on the stereotypical hero’s journey, but it could have been tightened up to a solid two hours, instead of sprawling over an almost two and a half hours. Usually, I’m all for longer films, as I enjoy delving into the depths of character and narratives, and a well-made action sequence, but this time it just felt a little too lengthy and could have been shorter.

That being said, the performances, digitally captured, are very good, and as mentioned, the film looks great, it just didn’t captivate me as much as the other films have.

It’s entertaining enough, but I don’t know if we need yet another entry that doesn’t bring anything new to the franchise. The ending does set up things for another entry, perhaps the beginning of a new trilogy that shows a new conflict between humans and apes.

But do we need it?

I’m hoping that if we do get a new trilogy the last film ends with Taylor’s ship coming in for its crash landing.

I do like how these films look, and I like the visual effects, but they are still visual effects, there’s always going to be that part of the brain that says ‘that’s not real,’ and that keeps interfering with my suspension of disbelief.