Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 2024
Wes Ball (the Maze Runner films) directs the 10th Apes movie, set 300 years after Caesar, with no Caesar and no big human star to anchor it. Written by Josh Friedman (the Avatar sequels), it follows the young ape Noah, the orangutan Raka who preserves Caesar's teachings, the human Mae/Nova (Freya Allan), and the tyrant Proximus Caesar, who has enslaved apes and hoards human knowledge to seize a coastal vault. Sean and Amanda were both a little bored: gorgeous, fully realized effects but two and a half hours of glide-on-ambition adventure, and ideas they found rehashed and 101-level. Sean's core knock is that it's Star Wars: A New Hope in ape form and Apocalypto-adjacent: framework without the Han Solo. Van capes for it, an 8 out of 10 on The Midnight Boys, praising the ambition of its competing societies and Noah as a Luke Skywalker/Caesar every-ape, while conceding the drag and the thin Mae. All agree the marvelized final five minutes (Mae reaching other humans via a satcom key) hook you for a next movie that flips the franchise toward humans.
