Many generations after the events of the first three films, the great Caesar was only a name in oral legends among apes. One day, three young chimps -- Noa (Owen Teague), Soona (Lydia Peckham) and Anaya (Travis Jeffery) -- risked life and limb to steal eagle eggs from nests as required in their tribe customs. However, before the ceremony the next morning, their settlement was invaded and destroyed by another tribe of bigger apes.
Noa, who was able to survive and avoid capture, rode out into the forest to look for his tribemates. He encountered Raka (Peter Macon), a wise old orangutan, the last survivor of a tribe that preserved Caesar's legacy. A female human whom they named Nova (Freya Allan) also went along with them. While crossing a bridge over a violent river, they encounter brutal apes who served their King -- Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).
As this story happened supposedly centuries after Caesar, writer Josh Friedman and director Wes Ball had to rebuild a whole new world of civilized apes and savage humans. The first act took its time to introduce us to a tribe of chimpanzees that had a special relationship with eagles, represented by Noa, the central character of these new stories. The second act brought us to the world beyond Noa's ken just as he was discovering it himself.
While the computer-generated, motion-capture imagery of the chimps and apes were as impressive as before, the first two acts took quite a bit of time to tell its story and introduces its new characters. However, by the third act when Noa and Nova (who called herself Mae) were in the seaside kingdom of Proximus Caesar, that was only then that the main point of this reboot-sequel (and its own sequels to come, if ever) was fully revealed
The explosive wet and wild action set pieces of Act 3 set-up a renewed man vs. ape rivalry that started the whole franchise off in the original 1968 film. In setting this conflict up, I had questions aplenty about the timelines of the story. How could the events of Act 3 be logically possible if it actually happened 300 years after Caesar? Was there a time warp? Was there a time travel? I guess we'll see those answers in the sequel.
This review was originally published in the author's blog, “Fred Said.”