Planet of the Apes Movies Ranked
8. Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
The ape messiah Caesar returns as the architect of an uneasy truce between the simians and humankind’s last survivors, but a gorilla military coup kicks off the conflict between species once more.
As the title suggests, Battle for the Planet of the Apes is supposed to be a war film, and you’ve got to admire the filmmaking ambition. Unfortunately, the combat scenes underwhelm in both scope and budget – there’s only so much you can do with two dozen extras in rubber ape suits running around in a field.
Roddy McDowall mesmerises as Caesar, demonstrating more range than should be possible behind a mask, plus we’re given an interesting villain in the insecure, reactionary gorilla General Aldo (Claude Akins). The final ten minutes or so of this film are near-faultless, a deliciously dark deconstruction of the plot and characters of the series so far.
7. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Review
Taking the Apes movies into a new era with a huge time jump and making the simians front-and-centre like never before, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes had a lot of legwork to do. While it is undeniably technically impressive, it does lack meaningful emotional connectivity and does slightly outstay its welcome.
If you’re going to stick with an ambitious quest movie for this long, you need to make your characters more compelling and nuanced, and make sure the villain doesn’t overshadow them. As good as Owen Teague is as lead chimp Noa (with the pressure of inheriting the franchise from Andy Serkis), he is overshadowed by Kevin Durand with far more limited screentime.
The franchise’s many smart ideas and meaningful characterisation needs to coalesce more strongly in future instalments to ensure that Weta’s seamless VFX don’t become the only draw.
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6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Reshaping key elements from earlier films to make them more relevant in contemporary times, the second reboot of the series opens strongly and then tails off as it goes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes gives Andy Serkis his third great performance-capture role as Caesar – the moving sequence documenting his formative years is magical, and when he is sent to live in a zoo it is utterly heartbreaking; all of this mostly being thanks to Serkis’ committed work.
Sadly, most of the human characters are dull and one-note – nobody (with the possible exception an empathetic of John Lithgow) are anywhere near as interesting or easy to relate to as a chimp who doesn’t say anything until more than halfway through. This is testament to Serkis’ skill, but also a sign that the rest of the cast’s performances are lacklustre. The plot is reasonably entertaining, with some nice nods to the original Apes films, and the visuals are beautiful, but they did use the same silly premise as Deep Blue Sea to explain why scientists want to make non-humans hyper-intelligent (to cure Alzheimer’s of course), so maybe this wasn’t quite as highbrow as it was aiming to be.
