Collection
Planet of the Apes
The 1968 original and its sequels, Burton's remake, and the reboot trilogy that was better than anyone expected.
Which order? Two continuities: the 1968 run, and Rise (2011) onwards.
Planet of the Apes (Original)
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Planet of the Apes 1968Schaffner’s adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel is the best film to carry the name: a lean, hostile adventure that puts Charlton Heston in a cage and lets the apes do the talking. The satire is broad and sometimes cute. The ending is not.Fi1m 84 - 2
Beneath the Planet of the Apes 1970Ted Post’s sequel spends its first half retracing the original with a smaller cast and its second half somewhere far stranger. A gorilla general, a Leonard Rosenman score and a last minute of real nerve; not quite enough for a whole evening.Fi1m 50 - 3
Escape from the Planet of the Apes 1971Don Taylor turns the series inside out: two talking chimpanzees land in present-day California and are lionised, then feared. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter make it the funniest entry and, in its second half, the saddest. The budget shows in every frame.Fi1m 77 - 4
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes 1972The fourth Apes film is the cheapest and the angriest, a slave revolt staged on a concrete plaza with rubber masks and real fury. J. Lee Thompson cannot hide the budget and does not try; what he has instead is Roddy McDowall and a grievance.Fi1m 73 - 5
Battle for the Planet of the Apes 1973The fifth and last of the original Apes films arrives with the budget gone and the ideas mostly gone with it. Roddy McDowall holds it together from behind the mask, but the battle of the title is a scuffle in a wood.Fi1m 36
Planet of the Apes (Reboot)
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes 2011Andy Serkis gives Caesar enough feeling and intelligence to make this origins story matter. Rupert Wyatt delivers an absorbing science-fiction thriller, though the humans are thinly written and the dialogue sometimes tells us what the ape has already shown.Fi1m 80 - 7
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes 2014Matt Reeves’s sequel spends its first hour with apes who sign more than they speak, and Andy Serkis and Toby Kebbell are the best things in it. The humans are not, and that keeps a fine film short of a great one.Fi1m 78 - 8
War for the Planet of the Apes 2017Matt Reeves closes the trilogy with a slow, snowbound revenge story and the best-acted ape ever put on screen. It is handsome, serious and half an hour too long, and its humans are far less carefully drawn than its chimpanzees.Fi1m 74 - 9
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 2024Wes Ball’s continuation of the series is handsome, unhurried and decent-hearted, with an overgrown world worth the ticket and a young chimp worth following. It is also 145 minutes long and does not have enough story to fill them.Fi1m 64
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