Quote from: T Dog on May 10, 2024, 11:40:29 AMI think Dawn is one of the best big budget mainstream movies ever made, how does it compare to that?
(Note: I say this from the POV of being a person that likes
War a bit more than
Dawn, I think. But
Dawn rocks!)
I guess if I were to rank the new series, I'd say this is probably a bit above
Rise, a bit below the Reeves ones. But that's all pretty malleable/subject to change, and what I really love here the way
Kingdom marries the sensibilities of the recent trilogy with the more expanded post-human world of the original movies (I've always adored the original five film run), and charts a pretty clear path from one body of films to the other in terms of the Apes' societies (emphasis on the plural form of the word there) and their relationship with what humans used to be which we know, eventually, will evolve into them forgetting what humans ever were (yes, I know the original films and the current ones are not in the same continuity, but it still feels like these movies are building towards roughly that same endgame result that was the Ape culture in the 1968 film). And on the topic of varying degrees of remembering and forgetting what once was, I really like the way that Caesar's legacy runs through this outing as a series of competing myths about who he was, what lessons he imparted, and what his actions ~300 years ago mean for Apes (and humans) at large now, so far removed from direct, in-the-moment impact his actions. His presence looms pretty heavily here, though the new characters are all pretty standout as well, some totally outside of Caesar's shadow, and others very directly taking cover within it.
