The Planet of the Apes reboot franchise reaches its fourth part, and ominously this time the director is the hack behind the Maze Runner trilogy, which was a yet another poor cash-in on the success of The Hunger Games.
300 years after the death of Caesar, the first intelligent ape, apes in scattered settlements dominate Earth, while the few remaining humans are mute scavengers. So, pretty much the set-up of the 1968 film when the astronauts arrived there, and the film milks references to the source for all they're worth, the protagonists even naming a young human female they come across 'Nova'. The chimpanzees are peaceful and the gorillas are violently aggressive, the lead character Noa being one of the former, on a quest to get back to his clan and finding an ape labour camp ruled by a megalomaniac bonobo instead.
While it succeeds in making the motion-capture ape cast engagingly real, the bare-bones plot in no way justifies the film's running time of nearly two and a half hours and no amount of pant-hooting and CGI leaping around can cover that up. This franchise has to end now.
5/10
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