tl;dr not worth watching for itself but is fine background noise for when you are doing something else
Not that the franchise was ever better than "not unwatchable" but this one came out just below that threshold.
A multi century time jump after the last one, peaceful ape tribe is doing peaceful ape stuff when they get bumrushed by warlike ape tribe and conscripted into being their helots. The main hero ape from peaceful tribe has to find a way to free them.
I'm probably not the right audience but chimpanzee politics doesn't exactly get my blood flowing. The CG was impressive but the CG is impressive everywhere nowadays. There was the obligatory human/ape interaction where they had to, yet again, point out how humans are the really uncivilized and the apes are better.
It is 2.5 hours and a slog and I watched it over 4 days, mostly in the background while scrolling twitter or eating lunch.
No obvious wokeness beyond mild anti-humanism which is almost obligatory. I thought the woman human character was exhibiting mary-sueness until it is sort-of explained how she is so knowledgeable.
The best thing it has going for it is CG eagles are cool.
This will become more and more noticeable as time goes on, as an example that bothered me a lot the normies praise the Dune reboot. I'm somebody who read the original book and watched the original movie. Just looking at some of the clips it reminded me of the witcher series so much where it was clearly designed by somebody who didn't give two shits about the universe or the lore and as a result everything looked generic as hell.
Even with Star Wars, lets be real, the only vaguely iconic thing they seem desperate to include are lightsabers, star destroyers and stormtroopers as well as a few other must have starship designs. You could put most of their costume design and general 3D work in any other sci-fi show and you'd barely be able to notice the difference which I believe is very on purpose and why modern titles are so damn boring.
I disagree about what is iconic about Star Wars. Luke, Leia, Han are the most iconic images from Star Wars. Following them in a second tier would be Chewie, Artoo, Vader, Yoda, Obi-Wan.
The objects that exist is SW are indeed part of the zeitgeist and even normies know what a lightsaber and the Death Star are. But even more know Luke's father and "Use the force"
You misunderstand. He's saying that Lightsabers are the only thing Disney thinks is iconic.