The last few “Planet of the Apes” movies were okay, but I was getting tired of them. So I wasn’t looking forward to this picture.
This takes place centuries in the future, long after the main character – Caesar – has died. This two hour and 30 minute movie gives us the first hour of apes, and no humans [full disclosure: I fell asleep for about 25 minutes of that].
Gorillas are now dominating all the nice chimps. The baddest of the bunch is Proximus Caesar. He’s spending a lot of his time trying to learn a lot from a human that’s reading to him (played by William H. Macy, who sounded like George Carlin). Proximus Caesar uses chimps as slaves, mostly trying to break into a human lab. He thinks it holds some secrets he can use.
There’s a young chimp named Noa, who is voiced by Owen Teague (I loved him in “You Hurt My Feelings” and “To Leslie” but didn’t care for his voice work here). He escapes a gorilla attack and ventures off on his own. He meets a human (Freya Allan) who has been following him around. Humans are called “echoes” for some reason. She turns out to be a lot smarter than she initially appears.
He meets an old, wise orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon). Their relationship isn’t all that interesting, but he fills him in on all the real things Caesar said and stood for. Yet none of that gives us any more sympathy for the plight of these chimps, and surprisingly, we don’t feel all that much sympathy for the humans that are getting rounded up.
The third act is about the only time we get anything interesting – and those were some fight scenes (although what happens to the bad guy was predictable, and also looked kind of silly, unless you were Alfred Hitchcock).
My wife and I were bored to tears watching it, but if you’re a fan of the series (or Dian Fossey), you’ll dig it.
It had great CGI, but lacked emotion.
1 star out of 5.