I haven't. I gave up after the second one. I always got the impression that they were pale sequels to the real movie. (Kind of like Rambo)
It's unfortunate to hear that they retconned the evolution aspect. That was a very important part of the movies' contribution to science fiction .
Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk
The evolution aspect was never truly part of the apes taking over, though. As was stated by
Zombie_61 that was essentially just propaganda by Dr Zaius to try to suggest that apes were naturally the top of the evolutionary chain.
Retconning things becomes an interesting subject when you start having time travel in a franchise as well.
To me, personally, the reboot films do a better job of showing how a Planet of the Apes would begin without relying on something that physics states is impossible...traveling BACK through time. I always kind of felt like that was a weak way of explaining how the situation started in the first place. The reboots idea of testing cognitive drugs on animals is, again to me personally, a much better way of "starting" the idea that apes will end up being the dominant species on the planet. I mean, if you think about it humans are only dominant because of our intelligence...we aren't strong, or fast, or really very physically adept...so if you take a bunch of apes and suddenly make them as smart as us, there's a good chance we'll end up losing that battle.
For what it's worth, the reboots also could be argued that they stick a bit more closely to the source material. In the original book there was one chimp who first spoke, and that was kind of the start of it all. That is actually the case in the reboots, generally speaking. The original sequels, however, have the apes travel back in time where they end up being famous and everyone knows about them. This contradicts that source material as there was no mention of three apes showing up out of nowhere who could talk and then became famous.
So anyway...the rebooted films fit more with the source material, offer an explanation for why the whole thing started that relies on a much more believable cause, and don't really retcon anything because the time travel aspect makes it so really a filmmaker can do whatever they want, as they can always explain it away with "it changed the future" or whatever when "such and such went back in time."