Caesar’s instincts as a leader remain more moral and humane than the species that created him, and the earth continues to thrive largely without the people who were previously helping to destroy it. The film’s imagery is impressively bleak, but it’s in service of a disappointing retread of Dawn’s story. Though the sight of these simian sonderkommandos is initially horrifying, Reeves doesn’t do much with them, and that whole sub-plot gets a pat resolution as the Colonel’s last stand draws to a bloody close. In War, we’re just watching the final death throes of our own species. The most compelling dynamic comes with the evolved apes who work for the Colonel, who are referred to as “donkeys” and exist as second-class citizens within his miserable militia. In War, what remains of humanity is basically a plague waiting to be finally scrubbed away-a notion that doesn’t really make for good drama. Caesar’s need to destroy the Colonel feels reasonable, rather than like a reflection of his darkest demons.ĭawn gave more of an emotional grounding to the rift between Caesar (who had largely been treated kindly by human scientists in Rise) and Koba (who was essentially tortured into existence). The Colonel, surely named for Kurtz of Apocalypse Now (Harrelson is similarly bald and insane), is an uninteresting tyrant who has enslaved groups of apes to fortify his base in preparation for some final, mysterious conflict. It’s here that I began to lose the thread of whatever allegory Reeves is working with. Much of the action in War is framed around that personal struggle, charting Caesar’s mission to attack a particular colony of militant humans led by the unnamed Colonel (Woody Harrelson). In War, the carnage is taken for granted and Caesar’s conflict is internal, as he wrestles with his own desire for payback (represented by taunting nightmares he has of Koba) versus the necessity of leading his colony to a newer, safer place far away from human threats. That film was a parable of the toxicity of humanity and the corrupting power of guns-its main conflict broke out when the villainous, vengeful ape Koba (Toby Kebbell) found a cache of weapons. In War, though, Reeves doesn’t do enough to build on the major achievements of Dawn. In fact, anytime it did, I found my mind wandering. As with Dawn, I never found myself yearning for the story to cut to flesh-and-blood actors. That Reeves is presenting a big-budget summer blockbuster centered on CGI simians who largely communicate in sign language is still one of the most flabbergasting triumphs of the current blockbuster age even more impressive is how naturally Caesar and his compatriots come across. War for the Planet of the Apes is long-at 140 minutes, easily the longest Apes film ever-and meditative, stripping away relatable human characters to focus entirely on the hero Caesar (Andy Serkis, the king of motion-capture performance), the chimpanzee who leads a colony of apes in California’s redwood forests.
The Beloved Filipino Tradition That Started as a Government Policy Sara Tardiff But War, set two years after Dawn, has a disheartening sameness to it and none of the visual jolt of Reeves’s last film.
Reeves’s vision of the aftermath, in Dawn, was so surprising and effective because of how verdant the world looked-with human influence receding, nature became overgrown and lush, and forests reclaimed all of the pitiful manmade infrastructure. The “war,” after all, was lost by humans long ago, when the “simian flu” (the same super-virus that enhanced the apes’ intelligence) wiped out most of the planet’s population at the end of Rise. Perhaps Exodus of the Apes would have suited better. Instead, the writer and director Matt Reeves (returning after his sterling work with Dawn) has created a pseudo-Biblical epic shot through with apocalyptic fervor, a tale of the old world order dying out and being replaced with something different. The third film in this retelling of one of Hollywood’s strangest franchises is not about a grand battle between man and super-ape, a showdown that began brewing in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and exploded into all-out conflict in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It is necessary to note, from the start, that War for the Planet of the Apes is perhaps misleadingly titled.