Revisiting How Hollywood DESTROYED Planet of the Apes

[00:00:00]What if I told you that the greatest trilogy of the 21st century stars a character you will never meet in real life because he isn't human? Not Iron Man, not Batman, not any chosen one with a glowing sword, a chimpanzee, a digital chimpanzee who was born in a lab, raised in a house, and died on a hillside watching his [music] children play in the sun. And somehow, across three films, he became one of the most emotionally complete characters in the history of cinema. Today, we're going deep on the full story of Planet of the Apes. From the 1968 masterpiece that invented [music] the twist ending to the Caesar trilogy that nobody expected to the Burton disaster that nearly killed everything to Kingdom and where this [music] franchise goes next. This is the most underrated sci-fi IP in Hollywood, and it's time to talk about why. If I sat you down and told you that one of the most emotionally resonant [music] Shakespearean trilogies of the 21st century features a lead actor wearing a gray spandex suit with ping pong balls glued to his face, you'd probably tell me to lay off the Belgian ale and seek therapy, but here we are. The Caesar trilogy is a master class in making you feel more for a digital chimpanzee than you do for 90% of the human characters Disney has spat out in the last 5 years.

[00:01:15]It is a miracle of technology meeting actual soul. I love this franchise. I even was genuinely hyped for a certain entry, a film I thought would carry the torch, and it ended up being, well, a bit of a nothingburger. And no, I'm not talking about the Tim Burton disaster from 2001. We already know that's a legendary radioactive dumpster fire.

[00:01:32]Today, we're doing a deep dive and retrospective of the entire Planet of the Apes saga. An honest look at what worked, what didn't, and why this might be the most underrated sci-fi IP in history. We're going from the 1968 Charlton Heston classic that redefined the twist ending through the weird 70 sequels, the Burton reboot, all the way to Kingdom. But instead of starting at the chronological beginning, let's start where the franchise actually found its heart. Let's talk about the moment it rose from the grave and did the impossible. It is very easy to forget just how much of a joke the Planet of the Apes brand was in 2011. After Tim Burton's 2001 reimagining effectively nuked the franchise from orbit with its rubber masks and that nonsensical Abraham Lincoln ending, nobody was asking for more. When 20th Century Fox announced a reboot, the collective internet groan was audible from space.

[00:02:20]We all thought we were getting more factory line corporate slop, just a cheap cynical attempt to milk a dead IP for a few more million before it was buried for good. And then Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out and it essentially slapped the taste out of everyone's mouth. Directed by Rupert Wyatt, a guy who at the time was far from a household name, Rise did something that 99% of modern blockbusters failed to do. It took a fundamentally ridiculous concept and treated it with absolute unwavering sincerity. There's no winking at the camera here. There are no self-aware quips about how it's a movie about talking monkeys. It's a grounded and deeply empathetic drama that just happens to center around a chimpanzee.

[00:02:58]But before we get into the genetic experiments and the human hubris that eventually handed the keys of the planet to Caesar, I want to talk about our own health. Because being a person in the 21st century is basically a masterclass in procrastination. I'm the kind of guy who can spend 40 hours a week deep diving into the frame rate of a digital chimpanzee. But now, let's get back to the Planet of the Apes. The genius of Rise starts with its premise. In the original 1968 film, we had time traveling spaceships and nuclear loops, which was cool for the Cold War era, sure, but for a modern audience, Wyatt needed something more tangible. So, he swapped the sci-fi spectacle for grounded realism. The inciting incident here is an experimental Alzheimer's cure called ALZ112.

[00:03:38]It's genetic engineering. It's a scientist, Will Rodman played by James Franco, trying to save his father from a devastating disease. This was a stroke of narrative brilliance because it brings the collapse of human civilization into something we actually understand, Human love, human desperation, and human hubris. James Franco is well, he's James Franco. He gives a solid empathetic performance even if I had a hard time buying him as a high-level geneticist. He looks more like a guy who'd write a thesis on the artistic merits of a sandwich than a scientist creating a world-ending viral pandemic. But you know, his performance doesn't need to be Shakespearean because the human side of this movie is just a vessel for the true protagonist and that of course is Caesar. If you want to understand why this franchise works you have to look at the transition Caesar undergoes in this film. It's a unique, tragic coming of age story. For the first half of the movie, Caesar is effectively a collar-wearing pet. He's a member of the Rodman family, sure, but he's still living in a cage, wearing clothes, and looking at the world through a window. He's happy, but he's ignorant. But then reality sets in. He realizes he's an experiment, a victim of human failure. When Caesar is sent to the primate sanctuary, which is a nice name for what is essentially a concentration camp for apes, the tone of the movie shifts dramatically. This is where we see the first cracks in the system. We meet Jacobs, the corporate suit who cares more about profit margins than effects, and Dodge Landon played by Tom Felton. Now, Tom Felton is basically just playing evil Draco Malfoy with a taser here and he is comically cruel.

[00:05:05]But it works for the story. It highlights that most of humanity fails because of petty systemic cruelty. We treat things we don't understand like garbage and eventually that garbage is going to find a way to throw itself back at us. Now, we need to talk about the man, the myth, the legend Andy Serkis.

[00:05:21]I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Academy's refusal to give this man an Oscar nomination for playing Caesar is a crime that should be investigated by a grand jury. We are talking about a performance that redefined what acting actually is. In 2011, there was still this pretentious notion that motion capture wasn't real acting. People thought it was just the animators at Weta Digital doing the work while the actor just stood there. That is absolute nonsense. When you watch Caesar, it is way more than watching impressive pixels. You are seeing a soul. Circus conveys an entire internal monologue through a slight twitch of the lip, a furrow of the brow, or the way he uses his eyes to communicate vulnerability, betrayal, and eventually a cold, calculating rage. This was a revolution where digital technology allowed Circus to be on location interacting with the human actors, which grounded the digital apes in a way that made them feel hyperreal. You never for a second think, "Oh, that's a CGI monkey." You think, "That's a person who's about to start a revolution." And that leads us to the no scene. You know the one. This is the Statue of Liberty moment for the reboot era. When Caesar finally snaps, catches Dodge's hand, and screams in a guttural, terrifyingly human voice the word no. Audiences went silent. It was a moment of pure cinematic power, the birth of a legend.

[00:06:36]In that one word, the franchise was elevated, the moment Caesar transitioned from a victim into a leader. One of the most fascinating things about Rise is how it subtly manipulates audiences' loyalty. By the time we reach the final act, the battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, you aren't rooting for the humans. You aren't rooting for the cops or the military. You are rooting for the apes. You want to see them break free.

[00:06:57]You want to see Caesar lead his family to the redwoods. The film makes you complicit in the downfall of your own species, and it does it so effectively because it has spent 90 minutes showing you exactly why humanity doesn't deserve to keep the crown. Jacobs, the corporate antagonist, pushes the ALZ-113 drug too fast because he wants the money. He doesn't care that it's fatal to humans.

[00:07:18]He is the architect of our destruction.

[00:07:20]The simian flu that eventually wipes out 99% of the population is a human-made mistake fueled by corporate greed. This is a recurring theme in the best apes movies. We are the authors of our own extinction. We create the cage, we create the virus, and then we act surprised when the lock breaks. Rise of the Planet of the Apes succeeded where Tim Burton failed because it realized that you can't just put actors in goofy rubber suits and hope for the best. You need a soul. You need a character arc.

[00:07:46]You need to make the audience care about the other. While Wyatt leaned into camp and weirdness, Wyatt leaned into character and slow burn tension. He took the ridiculous idea of talking apes and turned it into a grand tragic origin story about revolution and the search for dignity. It was honestly a miracle of blockbuster filmmaking. A film that used its $93 million budget for substance. It laid the foundation. It gave us a hero we were willing to follow through two more films. And most importantly, it set a bar so high that any following director would have to be either a genius or a madman to try and clear it. Now, luckily for us, Matt Reeves happened to be a bit of both.

[00:08:22]Going from Rise to Dawn is like going from a great indie drama to a full-blown war epic. And the jump in quality is night and day. But before we get into how Matt Reeves turned this into a political masterpiece, we have to appreciate the foundation that Wyatt built. Without the emotional core of Rise, without the father-son tragedy, and without Circus proving that Caesar was a real person, the rest of this trilogy simply doesn't exist. So, following Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a rare, beautiful thing when a sequel doesn't just do more of the same, but fundamentally evolves the DNA of the story. I heard many toss around comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back or The Godfather Part II, and usually that's just hyperbole, the kind of junk food praise people used to sell tickets for the latest superhero movie. But with Dawn, the comparison is kind of actually earned. Rupert Wyatt gave us a brilliant origin story, but Matt Reeves, Reeves took the keys to the kingdom and turned it into a full-blown Shakespearean tragedy. He stepped in and immediately said, "Okay, we've seen how they rose.

[00:09:21]Now let's see how they rule and how they fall." The film pulls a ballsy move right out the gate by jumping 10 years into the future. The Simian Flu we saw spreading during the credits of the first movie, yeah, it did its job.

[00:09:32]Humanity's been effectively evicted from the planet. Civilization has collapsed.

[00:09:36]The internet is a memory. and the few humans left are huddled in crumbling urban pockets like San Francisco, desperately trying to find a way to turn the lights back on. But while the humans were rotting, Caesar was building. The first 10 minutes of this movie are a piece of show, don't tell visual storytelling. We don't get a clunky narrator or a text crawl explaining the last decade. Instead, we get silence. We see the redwoods. We see a sophisticated primitive society. They have architecture, spiky tree houses that look like they belong in a high-budget fantasy epic. They have laws carved into stone, "Ape not kill ape." They even have an education system with Maurice, the orangutan, the intellectual soul of this franchise, teaching the young ones to read and sign. This is a civilization, and because we spent all that time in Rise becoming invested in Caesar's soul, seeing him as a king, a father, and a leader feels completely earned. Andy Serkis is once again doing the heavy lifting, but now the technology has caught up to his ambition. The CGI is so flawlessly photo- real that you can see the individual gray hairs on Caesar's muzzle and the weight of 10 years of leadership in his eyes. He has moved beyond being a revolutionary. He is now a statesman trying to keep a fragile peace. But every great hero needs a foil, and Dawn gives us one of the best antagonists in sci-fi history, Koba. Caesar is the dream of what an ape can be, but Koba, played by the incredible Toby Kebbell, is the nightmare of what humans made them. Koba isn't evil for the sake of being evil. He's a monument to human cruelty. In Rise, we saw him as a scarred, tortured lab subject. So, we see that he hates humans because he knows exactly what we are capable of when we have a cage and a scalpel. The dynamic between Caesar and Koba is the meat of this movie. Caesar's tragedy is his hubris, his belief that apes are inherently superior to humans because they lack human greed and fallibility.

[00:11:25]He tells himself, "Apes together strong," believing that brotherhood alone will protect them from the rot.

[00:11:30]But Koba is the living proof that hate is a universal language. When Koba pretends to be a dumb dancing circus monkey to lure in two human guards and then brutally executes them with an assault rifle, it's one of the most chilling sequences in cinema. A moment where you realize the ape has learned the worst traits of his masters. Now, let's talk about the humans. Usually in these movies, the humans are the most boring part. Generic protagonist number four and greedy executive number two.

[00:11:56]And while Jason Clarke's Malcolm is a bit of a generic bridge builder architect type, the film actually treats the human faction with a surprising amount of nuance. Malcolm is just a guy trying to fix a dam to save his community. And then there's Gary Oldman as Dreyfus. In any other movie, Dreyfus would be a cartoon villain who just wants to kill the monkeys. But Reeves is too smart for that. He is instead a desperate leader who has lost his entire family to the flu. He is motivated by fear and grief. When he finally gets the power back on and looks at digital photos of his dead children on an iPad, your heart breaks for him. He's the mirror image of Caesar, a leader doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

[00:12:32]The central theme of Dawn is the staggering fragility of peace. It suggests that you can have 99% of people on both sides wanting to avoid war, but all it takes is one bad ape, Koba, and one bad human, Carver, to light the fuse. Peace requires constant work, but war only requires a single lie. And Koba's lie is a master class in political manipulation. By shooting Caesar and blaming the humans, Koba weaponizes Caesar's own ideology. He twists apes together strong into apes must destroy. He initiates a coup, purges the loyalists, and leads a terrifying cavalry charge. Apes on horseback with machine guns into the heart of San Francisco. This is where Matt Reeves really shows off his directorial flair. There's a 38-second uncut shot where the camera is fixed on the turret of a moving tank as it spins in the middle of a visceral chaotic battle. It's a technique that immerses you in the horror of the conflict. You see the world through the barrel of a gun. It's a stark reminder that we've moved away from the heart of Rise and into a gritty post-apocalyptic war drama. But even amidst the fire and the tank shells, the film never forgets the characters. The final confrontation between Caesar and Koba on top of the tower is a philosophical debate settled with fists. When Koba tries to invoke the law ape not kill ape to save his life, Caesar realizes his own fundamental mistake. He grabs Koba and says, "You are not ape." before letting him fall. It's a victory, but it's a pyrrhic one. Caesar has killed one of his own. broken his own law. He has realized that apes are just as fallible, just as violent, and just as broken as the humans they replaced. The realization on Caesar's face in the final scene is devastating. He has won the battle, but he has lost the future he dreamed of. The final conversation between Caesar and Malcolm is, in my opinion, one of the most honest and depressing scenes in the genre. Malcolm tells Caesar to leave that the military is coming. Caesar looks at him and simply says, "War has already begun. Ape started war and human human will not forgive." There's no happy ending here.

[00:14:25]It's a stark, brutal acknowledgement of the cycle of violence. It's a political allegory for every conflict in human history where moderates are crushed by the weight of extremists on both sides.

[00:14:35]Caesar stands there bathed in the orange glow of a dying civilization, realizing that he has become the very thing he fought against in the first movie, a soldier. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a miracle. It's a $170 million blockbuster that prioritizes the no dialogue sequences and the expressive eyes of an orangutan over mindless explosions. It treats its audience like adults, handles of twisted ideology, systemic distrust, and the burden of leadership with more grace than most prestige dramas. And it leaves us in a place where the title Planet of the Apes finally feels like an inevitability rather than just a sci-fi premise. The humans are just ghosts haunting their own ruins. The world belongs to the apes now, but as Caesar finds out, the world is a heavy thing to carry. We have to appreciate the heights Reeves reached here. Dawn is the peak. It's the perfect balance of heart, soul, and spectacle.

[00:15:23]And as the credits roll and we hear the breathing of Caesar in the dark, we realize that the trilogy has one more step to take. If you walked into the theater in 2017 expecting Saving Private Ryan with chimpanzees, I don't blame you. The title is War for the Planet of the Apes. The marketing showed lines of soldiers, explosions, and Caesar looking like he was ready to drop a napalm strike on San Francisco. But Matt Reeves, being the absolute madman that he is, decided to pull one of the greatest bait-and-switches in blockbuster history. Because War isn't an action movie. It's not a pew-pew CGI fest designed to sell toys. It is a somber, haunting, genre-defying masterpiece that feels like a biblical epic directed by someone who hasn't slept in 3 weeks because they're too busy watching Apocalypse Now and The Searchers on loop. This is the concluding chapter of the Caesar trilogy, and it is easily the most profound and emotionally exhausting film of the three. It takes everything Wyatt started and Reeves expanded and pushes it into a territory where most Hollywood franchises are too terrified to go. The territory of genuine soul-crushing consequences. We pick up 2 years after the end of Dawn. The war that Caesar said had already begun is in full swing.

[00:16:30]The apes have retreated into the mountains trying to live in peace, but they are being hunted by a rogue paramilitary group called Alpha-Omega.

[00:16:38]And in the first 10 minutes, the film delivers a gut punch that changes Caesar forever. The Colonel, played by Woody Harrelson in a performance that is basically Colonel Kurtz with a shaved head and a god complex, infiltrates the ape camp and kills Caesar's eldest son and leaves his family shattered. And it's here that the movie stops being a war film and starts being a psychological western. Caesar, the leader who spent two movies trying to avoid conflict, finally breaks. He leaves his tribe to lead them to safety while he goes on a solo mission of revenge. Now, look at what Reeves is doing here. In 90% of modern franchises, this would be the cool part. We'd get a John Wick style montage of Caesar clapping soldiers in the woods. But War treats Caesar's quest for vengeance as a tragedy. For the first time, Caesar is wrestling with his inner Koba. He has been consumed by the very hate that destroyed his brother in the previous movie. He is hallucinating Koba in the shadows, a manifestation of his own guilt and rage. It is a stunningly mature way to handle a hero's journey by showing that the hero is actually losing his soul. And let's talk about Andy Serkis here. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but seriously, man, by this point, the technology has reached a level that is essentially indistinguishable from reality. You are watching a man's spirit crumble. The raw intensity, the sorrow, the sheer weight of Caesar's existence is all there in the eyes. Okay, Serkis didn't get the Oscar for Rise, but he definitely should have got it for War. It is a towering mythic performance that carries a movie that is often silent, relying on expressions and sign language to convey more emotion than a 3-hour monologue in a regular slop fest blockbuster. To balance out the darkness, Reeves introduces Bad Ape, played by Steve Zahn. Now, on paper, a funny talking monkey in a movie this depressing sounds like a disaster. It sounds like Jar Jar Binks wandering into Schindler's List.

[00:18:21]But, Bad Ape works because his humor is rooted in trauma. He's a lonely, broken survivor of a zoo who doesn't understand the world he's in. He provides the heart that Caesar has temporarily lost, and he serves as a reminder of what happens to an ape without a tribe. But, the real meat of the film is the dynamic between Caesar and the Colonel. Woody Harrelson is absolutely chilling here. He isn't a cartoon villain. He doesn't want to rule the world. He thinks he is the hero of a grand historical tragedy. He views himself as the lead to Caesar's ground, fighting a desperate holy war to prevent human extinction. And the Colonel is right to be afraid. The Simian Flu from the first movie has mutated. It's stripping humans of their speech and their higher thinking, literally de-evolving them. The irony is staggering. While the apes are becoming more human, learning to speak, building culture, wrestling with morality, the humans are turning into beasts. The Colonel's plan is to kill every infected human, including his own son, to save humanity's essence. He is a man so consumed by fear that he has become a monster in the name of preservation.

[00:19:20]When he and Caesar finally have their confrontation, what we see is a debate.

[00:19:25]They are mirrors of each other, two leaders convinced they are doing what is necessary for their species. The difference is that Caesar eventually rejects his hatred, while the Colonel is consumed by his. The third act of war shifts gear again, moving into the Bridge on the River Kwai territory. The apes are captured and forced into a labor camp to build the wall. Yes, Caesar's people are in a literal Exodus narrative. The biblical parallels here aren't subtle. Caesar is explicitly framed as a monkey Moses. He is the martyr who suffers so his people can be free. He is whipped, he is starved, and he is humiliated, all while carrying the burden of his tribe on his back. And the ending, it is one of the most bittersweet fitting conclusions I have seen in a film trilogy. Caesar leads his people through the mountains and the snow and across a literal collapsing world to reach the promised land, an oasis where they can finally be safe.

[00:20:12]But Caesar doesn't get to enjoy it. He was wounded in the escape. He sits on a hill watching his children play in the sun, knowing that his work is done. He looks at Maurice, the faithful friend who has been there since the beginning, and Maurice realizes Caesar is dying.

[00:20:25]Maurice signs, "Son will know who was father and what Caesar did for us."

[00:20:29]Caesar dies as a martyr, a mythic figure whose legend will guide his people for generations. It is a perfect ending.

[00:20:35]It's not happy, but it is earned. Caesar started in a kitchen in San Francisco and died as the father of a new world.

[00:20:42]When you look at this trilogy as a whole, Rise, Dawn, and War, it is a rare towering achievement in Hollywood. We live in a landscape of oversaturated franchises that don't know when to quit.

[00:20:53]We have Star Wars movies that contradict themselves every 5 seconds, Marvel films that feel like they were written by an AI tasked with making safe content, and Game of Thrones endings that make me want to Tommen jump out of a window. But the Caesar trilogy, it remained consistent. It had a clear vision from start to finish. It took a protagonist from birth to death and gave him a complete emotionally resonant arc. It managed to be smart, intellectual, and morally complex while still being a massive big-budget blockbuster. It is, quite frankly, one of the greatest trilogies of all time. It is right up there with the Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight, etc. And I'm serious. If you can watch these three films and not be moved by the journey of a digital ape, then you are a colder person than I am. It proved that you just need a good story. You need a great character, and a director who actually cares about the art of filmmaking to keep people engaged. Simple as that. Now, I think we all felt the same thing. Just leave it alone. Caesar was dead. The journey was complete. We had a perfect self-contained trilogy that managed to survive the Hollywood machine. But, of course, this is 20th Century Studios we're talking about. And as long as there is a moss growing on a derelict skyscraper, they are going to find a way to put a monkey on it and charge you 15 bucks for the privilege. And true, Wes Ball, the guy who gave us the Maze Runner films, which were fine, I guess.

[00:22:09]He had the unenviable task of following Matt Reeves, which is like being the guy who has to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid. You're probably going to be talented, but everyone is just waiting for the other guy to come back. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a strange beast. It's set roughly 300 years after Caesar's death, which was a genius move at first glance. It wipes the slate clean. It stops the movie from being a legacy sequel where we have to care about Caesar's great, great, great grandson's tax returns. Instead, we get a bronze age epic. Nature has fully reclaimed the Earth. San Francisco is now a metal forest of rusted rebar and vines. It looks incredible, like Horizon Zero Dawn, but with more sign language and fewer robot dinosaurs. And let's give it up for the technical side of things. Weta Digital is still the undisputed king of this stuff. I thought we reached the peak in War, but the way they handle water and digital fur in this movie is borderline witchcraft. For sure not Cameron's Avatar level, but as for me, it's very, very close. There are scenes of apes climbing through rain-soaked greenery that look more real than the actual world outside my window.

[00:23:12]Technically, this movie is a 10 out of 10. It is proof that when you actually give VFX artists time and a budget instead of treats and a cot in the office, they can create actual art. But a movie can't just be a tech demo, even if James Cameron thinks otherwise. It needs a soul. And this is where the measured praise for Kingdom starts to kick in. Our new protagonist is Noah, played by Owen Teague. Noah is he's all right. He's a next-generation hero, which in Hollywood speak usually means he's a teenager with daddy issues and a hero's journey so predictable that you can set your watch by it. Noah belongs to the Eagle Clan, a peaceful group that trains birds. He's a rule follower, he's a bit naive, and he lacks even an ounce of the mythic gravitas that Caesar had.

[00:23:53]Comparing Noah to Caesar is like comparing a high school quarterback to Moses. Caesar felt like a force of nature, Noah feels like he's in a young adult novel. It's a standard enlightenment arc where he learns that the world is bigger and nastier than his village. And while Teague's performance capture is solid, the script just doesn't dive deep enough into his psyche to make him truly iconic. The real star of the show and the reason I didn't fall asleep during the 145-minute runtime is Proxima Caesar. Kevin Durand is absolutely eating the scenery here, and I love every second of it. Proximus is a fascinating villain because he's an appropriator. He has taken Caesar's name and twisted his teachings into a tool for forced unity and subjugation. He is the anti-Caesar. He's obsessed with human history, specifically the Roman Empire, and he wants to use human technology to accelerate ape evolution.

[00:24:42]When he shouts, "What a wonderful day!"

[00:24:44]it's a terrifying display of charismatic tyranny. He shows us that he doesn't torture his own kind for fun, he does it because he's convinced he's the only one who can lead the apes into the future.

[00:24:53]He is the polar opposite of Raka, the orangutan who acts as the keeper of the truth and the only one who actually remembers what Caesar stood for. The tragedy of Kingdom is seeing how a noble motto like apes together strong can be butchered over 300 years until it's just a slogan for a dictator. That is a brilliant intellectual theme that feels worthy of the original franchise. But then we have the human problem. Freya Allan plays Mae or May, depending on who's asking. She is an Echo, one of the regressed feral humans who have lost the ability to speak, or so we think. It turns out she's part of a technologically preserved human enclave and she's on a mission to infiltrate the vault. Mae is a fascinating character because she's a loaded gun. She's duplicitous, she's cold, and she's fundamentally at odds with the apes.

[00:25:36]There's a scene where she and Noah are looking at the stars through a telescope and you think we're going to get a we can coexist moment, but the tension is always there. She is a survivor of a fallen empire trying to get the keys back. However, Freya Allan's performance feels a bit stiff. Maybe it's the writing, but she feels like she wandered in from a different less interesting movie. The conflict between Noah and Mae should be the heart of the film, but it often feels like a chess piece maneuver to get us to the next plot point. And that brings me to my biggest gripe with Kingdom, the pacing. My God, where's Bull? Could we maybe move a little faster? This movie is a patient film, which is a nice way of saying it's a lot of horse riding and staring at moss. The middle act drags its feet so much that you start to wonder if the plot has been regressed like the humans. It lacks the raw, relentless emotional intensity of Matt Reeves's films. In Dawn and War, every scene felt like a life or death struggle for the soul of a species. In Kingdom, it often feels like we're just wandering around waiting for the third act to start. And let's be honest about what this movie actually is. It's The Force Awakens of the Apes franchise.

[00:26:40]It's a restart. It's a setup movie. It spends 2 and 1/2 hours moving the chess pieces into position so that the next movie can be the one that we actually want to see. The references to the Icarus mission, the telescope, the tunnel that eats light, it's all screaming at us that we are heading toward a direct remake of the 1968 original. Is this a worthy continuation?

[00:26:59]I'd give it a solid seven out of 10.

[00:27:01]It's a visually breathtaking bronze age epic with some big ideas about how truth becomes mythology, but it lacks the heartstrings and the envelope-pushing nature of the Caesar trilogy. It feels safer, more blockbustery in a way that Reeves managed to avoid. It's a good film, but it's not a masterpiece. It's a nothing burger compared to the emotional feast of war. It is even sadder for me since I really had some expectations somewhere deep inside of me for this one. The 300-year gap felt intriguing at the time the movie was announced, but the outcome is what it is. Kingdom feels like a step down from the peak, but it's only because the peak was so high that it's in another zip code. But at least it's moving in the right direction. It respects the legacy, it doesn't wink at the audience with cheap fan service, and it takes itself seriously. But now let's look at the movie that didn't. Burton's Planet of the Apes is the definitive case study in how to take a billion-dollar IP, hire a visionary director, throw a mountain of cash at it, and still produce something that's so fundamentally broken that it nearly buried the franchise for an entire decade. The hype for this movie was crazy. The trailers were absolutely fire. They promised an epic war, incredible practical effects, and a darker, gritty take on the mythos. We all thought we were getting a masterpiece. Instead, we got a movie that is essentially the ugly stepchild of the apes family. The one you pretend doesn't exist when the guests come over.

[00:28:18]Burton famously coined the term reimagining because he was too terrified to call it a remake. He knew the 1968 original was nice enough, so he tried to distance himself from it by changing, well, everything that actually made the story work. The result was a film that had no identity, no soul, and a script that felt like it was written on the back of a cocktail napkin during a lunch break at Fox. Now let's start with the most glaring issue. The Boston bro in space. Mark Wahlberg as Captain Leo Davidson is one of the most baffling casting decisions in the history of cinema. I like Mark Wahlberg, I really do. He's great when he's playing a scrappy underdog or a high-energy cop, but as a high-level astronaut and scientist, give me a break. He doesn't look like he's trying to solve the secrets of the universe. He looks like he's trying to find Duncan Donuts in the forbidden zone. He is completely bland, uncompelling, and seemingly bored for the entire runtime. He has the emotional range of a bag of flour, which is a massive problem when he's supposed to be our bridge into this alien world. But it gets worse. For some reason, the writers decided to include a love triangle between Wahlberg, a human woman, and the ape Ari, played by Helena Bonham Carter.

[00:29:24]I'm not joking. There is actual sexual tension between Marky Mark and a chimpanzee. It is deeply uncomfortable, totally unnecessary, and it makes every scene they share feel like a fever dream you want to wake up from. It's the kind of weird for the sake of weird choice that Burton is known for, but here it just feels like absolute slop. And then there's the tone. This movie is a mess of conflicting ideas. One minute it's trying to be a dark, serious sci-fi drama about slavery and discrimination, and the next minute we have moments of bizarre, out-of-place comedy and using ape hip-hop. I wish I was making this up. Burton leans so hard into the monkey business that the tension evaporates instantly. You can't have a serious allegory about human rights where you're watching a gorilla do a slam dunk. It's campy, it's goofy, and it undermines every attempt at world-building this movie tries to make. One of the biggest narrative fumbles, however, is that the humans can speak. In the 1968 original and Caesar trilogy, the lack of human speech was a powerful thematic tool. It highlighted the regression of our species and the otherness of the apes.

[00:30:26]But in Burton's world, everyone speaks perfect English. This makes the apes' dominance feel entirely unearned and illogical. If the humans could talk, organize, and think at a high level, why haven't they revolted? Why are they just standing around waiting for a guy from Boston to save them? It weakens the social commentary to the point of being a nothingburger. Now, to be fair, I have to throw some credit toward the artisans because even in a disaster this big, there is some objective quality. Rick Baker's makeup work is legendary and for good reason. The prosthetics in this movie are spectacular. This was the peak of practical effects before the CGI revolution and in some shots, these apes look more convincing and tactile than the digital versions in the later films.

[00:31:06]They have a weight and a presence that is undeniable. Tim Roth as General Thade is a standout. He is over the top, intense, and genuinely threatening. He leans into the animalistic physicality in a way that makes you wish he was in a better movie. Paul Giamatti as the slave trader Limbo is also great, providing some of the only intentional comedy that actually lands. But all the great makeup in the world can't save you from a brain fart of an ending. Let's talk about the ape Lincoln controversy. In the 1968 original, the ending was a gut punch. It was a logical, horrifying revelation that changed everything you thought you knew about the world. Burton tried to replicate that wow factor, but he forgot to include the logic part. When Wahlberg finally escapes the planet and returns to Earth, he lands at the Lincoln Memorial only to find the statue of Abraham Lincoln has been replaced by a statue of General Thade. The police arrive and they're all apes. The credits then roll. Like, what? This ending makes absolutely zero sense. It's never explained how Thade, who was trapped on a primitive planet centuries in the past, somehow got to Earth even earlier, conquered it, and reshaped human society in the exact image of modern architecture. It's a twist for the sake of a twist and a twist that is so confusing that it just doesn't make any sense. It's the primary reason this reboot died on the operating table. The studio wanted a sequel, but Burton famously said he'd rather jump out of a window than do another one. And honestly, after sitting through this, I think the audience felt the same way.

[00:32:29]The 2001 film failed because it was a half measure. It didn't have the intellectual weight of the 1968 film and it didn't have the emotional sincerity of the Caesar trilogy. It was a style over substance exercise that leaned into the uncanny valley of being too weird to take seriously, but not fun enough to enjoy as a pure blockbuster. It proved that you can't just reboot Planet of the Apes by putting people in masks and hoping for the best. You need an idea.

[00:32:53]You need a soul. It's funny because the 2001 disaster actually did the franchise a favor in the long run. It set the bar so low that when Rise came along 10 years later, people were genuinely shocked to see a movie that actually had something to say. It reminded us that this franchise lives and dies on its ability to act as a mirror to humanity.

[00:33:11]But this wasn't the first time the Apes brand was run into the ground by studio greed and a lack of vision. Long before Tim Burton was flirting with chimpanzees, the original 60s era had already gone through the exact same cycle of greatness followed by absolute slop. So to understand why the Caesar trilogy was such a miracle, we have to look back at where it all began. We have to look at the 1968 masterpiece that started it all. And the four sequels that slowly, painfully sucked the life out of the original idea. Let's go back to the beginning, to the beach, to the statue, and the Charlton Heston performance that defined a generation.

[00:33:45]If we're going to be honest, every single thing we've talked about today, the technical wizardry of Weta, the Shakespearean drama of Matt Reeves, even the prosthetic nightmares of Tim Burton, it all leads back to a single perfect moment on a beach in 1968. You can't discuss this franchise without bowing the knee to the original Planet of the Apes. It is the reason we give this IP a chance every time it crawls out of the grave. The 1968 classic starring a peak intensity Charlton Heston is a miracle of subversion. It was co-written by Rod Serling, and you can feel his DNA in every frame. It's a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone with a Hollywood budget. He uses a slow-burn narrative to immerse you in a world where the natural order is ironically reversed, and it does it with a level of intellectual bite that most modern sci-fi wouldn't dare to attempt. It's impossible to forget that ending. The Statue of Liberty reveal is quite possibly the greatest twist in cinematic history. A thematic gut punch, it reframes the entire film from an alien adventure into a hopeless nihilistic warning about human self-destruction.

[00:34:47]Heston screaming at the surf is a eulogy for a species that was too arrogant to realize it was holding the match to its own funeral pyre. The strength of the 1968 film lies in its ability to provide a juicy allegory for the turbulent 60s without being a preachy mess. It satirizes human institutions through the ape caste system. You have the orangutans as the religious administrators and keepers of dogma, the chimpanzees as the ignored scientists, and the gorillas as the mindless military muscle. It's a mirror of our own society but reflected through a lens that makes us look pathetic. It's sharp, it's nasty, and it's brilliant. But because this is Hollywood, a perfect ending is just an invitation for a mediocre sequel. And in the 70s, they started the original factory line.

[00:35:28]Between 1970 and 1973, we got four sequels, each cheaper and more rushed than the last. It was a classic case of a studio squeezing a great idea until the pipsqueak. However, I have to give them credit. Even when the budget was basically a sandwich and a handshake, these movies had balls. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is a rushed rehash for about 40 minutes and then it goes absolutely insane. It features telepathic humans who worship a nuclear bomb and it ends with a protagonist literally triggering that bomb and destroying the entire planet. Talk about a final sequel. The writers basically said, "We don't know how to continue this, so let's just kill everyone." But the franchise refused to stay dead.

[00:36:07]Escape from the Planet of the Apes is widely regarded as the best of the bunch. It inverts the premise, bringing Zira and Cornelius to modern-day Earth.

[00:36:14]It starts as a fish-out-of-water comedy and slowly, painfully transforms into a devastating tragedy about systemic fear.

[00:36:22]It's brilliant low-budget filmmaking that focuses on character over spectacle. Then we got Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which is the darkest entry of them all. It's a straight-up allegory for slavery and the Watts riots. It gives us the original Caesar and a violent bloody uprising that makes you deeply uncomfortable with how humanity treats those it deems lesser.

[00:36:41]It's war, it's angry, and it's far more proactive than a monkey movie has any right to be. And finally, the original run ended with Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which is the definitive nothing burger of the era. By this point, the budget was so low you could see the zippers on the costumes and the story felt like a tired TV pilot. It was a whimpering end to a mythic journey.

[00:37:02]But the studio wasn't done milking the cow. We got a live-action TV series in 1974, which was canceled after 14 episodes because people realized watching astronauts run through the same three bushes every week was boring. Then came the animated series in 1975, which was well well just frankly it was atrocious. It lacked the intellectual weight and the grit of the films, feeling like a cheap cash-in for Ape Mania. The core takeaway from this original era is that apes are a mirror of humanity. When the franchise remembers that, when it treats humans as the lowest form of life to force us to reflect on our own petty issues, greed, and systemic cruelty, it's the best sci-fi on the planet. When it forgets that and just becomes about people in masks running around, it becomes the very slop it's trying to critique. The original era succeeded because it showed us a reflection of our own society and made us uncomfortable with what we saw in the glass. It established the soul of the franchise. And it's that soul that eventually allowed Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves to resurrect the brand 40 years later. They took the monkey Moses idea from Conquest and the philosophical depth of the 1968 original and turned it into the Caesar trilogy. So, here we are at the end of the road or the end of the beach, depending on which timeline you've accidentally landed in. Looking back at this 50-year history, it's clear that Planet of the Apes is the weirdest, most resilient, and most bipolar franchise in Hollywood. It's a pendulum that swings violently between Shakespearean high art and corporate action slop and yet somehow it refuses to die. Why is it so underrated? I think the answer is simple but also a bit uncomfortable. It's because these movies hate us. Well, they hate our ego anyway.

[00:38:36]Unlike Star Wars which sells you a hero's journey that you want to join or Marvel which sells you a power fantasy you want to inhabit, Planet of the Apes sells you the idea that humanity is the glitch in the planetary system. It is a massive multi-million dollar insult to human arrogance. It's the only franchise that consistently asks the audience to cheer for their own eviction. And when it's handled by someone with a shred of dignity like Rod Serling or Matt Reeves, it works because it taps you into a very real, very modern anxiety. The feeling that we are the architects of our own demise whether it's through a nuclear fire or a viral pandemic born in a corporate lab. The Caesar trilogy in particular remains a towering achievement because it gave us a digital protagonist with more internal life and more moral complexity than most prestige TV characters. Caesar belongs on the Mount Rushmore on sci-fi icons alongside Ellen Ripley and Rick Deckard. He was a person who just happened to be an ape.

[00:39:30]And that distinction is the difference between a nothingburger blockbuster and a masterpiece. Looking at Kingdom, I'm cautiously optimistic but I'm also a bit wary. It was a visually breathtaking setup burger but it showed the first signs of the factory line creeping back in. The moment [clears throat] this franchise stops being about the mirror to humanity and starts being about cameo simulators and setting up the next cinematic universe. Imagine if they suddenly introduce something like a clone Caesar in the upcoming Kingdom sequel. Like it's over. The future of this IP depends on whether the new directors can handle the bronze age of the apes with the same intellectual weight that Reeves brought to the table.

[00:40:04]We are clearly building toward a collision with the 1968 original. A remake of the Icarus mission is practically screaming at us from the horizon. I just hope they realize that the twist isn't the point. The point is the soul. In a cinema landscape dominated by safe iron clad formulaic garbage, Planet of the Apes remains one of the few places where big budget sci-fi is allowed to be dark, weird, and deeply cynical. It shouldn't have worked. A movie about talking chimps should have been a campy trash. But when it works, it's some of the best cinema that we have. So, thank you for sticking through this 40-minute journey into the heart of the metal forest. If you enjoyed this deep dive, do me a massive favor and hit that subscribe button.

[00:40:43]Also, let me know in the comments, are you team Caesar or do you secretly think the Colonel had a point? I won't judge, but the apes might. Take care of yourselves and remember, if a guy from Boston offers you a ride in a spaceship, just say no. It never ends well. Apes together strong. I'll see you in the next one.