“Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” of course, is the first sequel in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, which trades protagonists and follows a different astronauts who crash-lands on futuristic Earth. Brent, the astronaut, ends up discovering a population of telepathic mutated humans who worship a nuclear bomb and live in the underground ruins of New York City. 

It is an inherently silly and bizarre concept, even for a franchise about a futuristic world populated by talking apes. No wonder, then, that the reboot trilogy grounded things and mostly avoided any mention of telepathic mutants. Still, that doesn’t mean Matt Reeves (or now Wes Ball) shied away from lightly hinting at the movie itself. “War for the Planet of the Apes” introduced a ruthless military cult with an alpha and omega as their symbols — the same as the one on the bomb worshipped by the mutants. Now we have “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which doesn’t explicitly show humans living underground, or communicating telepathically. However, Proximus does talk about evolving beyond humans or apes via technology, the same technology that (if it were real and shown in a future film) could make humans evolve to have telepathic abilities. 

As weird as the telepathic bomb-worshipping humans are, they are an important aspect of the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. After all, they bring with them the absolute bleakest ending in a motion picture ever — the moment Charlton Heston’s Taylor gets mortally wounded (as per Heston’s request) and accidentally activates the doomsday bomb that literally explodes the planet. Like the previous trilogy, Wes Ball’s new film is a prequel, meaning we could see the lead-up to everything, including telepathic mutants.