Planet of the Apes franchise

The first one is still amazing.

Beneath has some cool ideas but flubs a few of them and also feels like half a movie stitched together.

Escape is fun, but the satire is a little redundant as the first movie did all this already with the roles reversed, and I don't like all the continuity-fiddling (suddenly Cornelius knows all this pre-history stuff and apes didn't just evolve after the nuclear war, there's all this stuff about dog plagues and ape slaves). 

One nice thing about these is that they're all around 90 mins.

I think I liked Conquest better than Escape - it feels more ambitious and satirical, and there's a bunch of cool stuff in there. However, it also gets pretty goofy and the continuity is getting ever more muddled. It ends really abruptly, too, with a kind of cognitively dissonant attempt to keep all the strands of lore together.

Battle is pretty bad. It reminded me of the Star Wars prequels - it's trying to say something about warmongers taking power via fear but it's compromised by cartoonishness, and it's also a bit racist and junks up the original's lore by finding loopholes by which to ignore its obvious intent.

Rise is invigorating. Everything's just done so well, great storytelling. Serkis and Lithgow are great. The story is rather simple and linear, and sometimes has that 'first film of a series' feel, like the first X-Men movie, but this does have good rewatch value and damn do I want to watch the sequel. The director makes it feel like a CG movie a few too many times when he gets carried away with the wheeling, impossible camera moves, and there are a few clunking moments, but these are made up for by all the clever stuff going on. It's hardly worth comparing to the 70s original, as they're such different films in every way, but the original is certainly more sophisticated and grand while this one is more slick and intimate.

I do enjoy the last two but they're not as tight as Rise.