Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Essential as the start of what comes next, and it is the gap of centuries that makes it interesting rather than the plot. Many generations after Caesar, nobody alive remembers him. What survives is a name, repeated by clans who have never met each other and who have each constructed a different version of what he taught.

That is the best idea the franchise has had since 2014. One leader has built a coastal empire on the claim that Caesar's doctrine commands conquest, invoking a founder he has misquoted into the opposite of what he said, and the film is unusually clear-eyed about how that happens: not through lies, but through a long chain of people passing on something they half-heard. The scene where a character who actually knew the history explains what the word originally meant is the most quietly devastating thing here.

Wes Ball directs it as an adventure, which is a shift from Reeves. A young ape leaves a falconry clan after a raid and travels across a continent reclaimed by forest, past drowned cities and a rusted satellite dish, and the film's best material is simply looking at the world. At a hundred and forty-five minutes it is slower than it needs to be in the middle.

The human thread is where opinion divides. Mae's position and the choice she makes near the end are deliberately unresolved, and the film ends on an ambiguity it clearly intends to continue rather than on a conclusion. Watch the Caesar trilogy first. This is a reply to it, and it does not work as an opening.