Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Skippable, and it is where the money finally ran out. The fifth film in five years was made for a fraction of the first one's budget, and the result is a post-apocalyptic epic staged with about forty extras in a field, a handful of reused masks and one armoured bus.

The idea underneath it is good and the film cannot afford it. Caesar now leads a settlement where apes and surviving humans live together uneasily, he is trying to build something better than what he was told the future holds, and the question is whether a society founded on a justified uprising can avoid becoming what it replaced. That is the right ending for this series. What is on screen is a skirmish between two underpopulated factions.

It is also the film that has to resolve the loop, and it fudges it. A framing device set centuries later has an orator telling the story and the final shot is deliberately ambiguous about whether any of it can be changed, which reads less as a philosophical position than as a production that had run out of time.

An extended cut restores around six minutes, including a scene that makes the mutant subplot coherent, and it is modestly better. Watch it only if you want the original run finished. Escape and Conquest are where this series actually ends.