During the height of the summer movie season, the theaters become inundated with the big dopey popcorn movie with the formula plot, plenty of explosions and rapid fire film editing that’s designed (not created--there’s no creativity to speak of, here) to keep the attention of the audience from wandering off the screen. For the most part these movies are completely forgettable, usually slipping from the minds of the audience once they leave the theater and start making plans to get something to eat.
But there was one film this summer that was anything but a ’by the numbers’, carefully designed blockbuster. War for the Planet of the Apes--the third film in the rebooted Ape trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and continued with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes--had also been released this summer, and the movie season is all the better for it.
Directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Dawn, War for the Planet of the Apes finally brings the epic war between Ape and Human that was foreshadowed at the end of Dawn. Caesar (played by Andy Serkis), the leader of the ape community, just wants to live in peace. After his tribe successfully fights off an attack by human soldiers, Caesar releases the captured humans back to their commander, a mysterious figure known only as The Colonel, as a show of mercy and a sign that he wants peace. But the response from The Colonel is another, far more deadly attack against the apes that leaves Caesar reeling from the loss of his wife and son at the hands of The Colonel himself.
With his tribe leaving their home to seek sanctuary from The Colonel’s attacks in a new location that's been discovered by his ape scouts, Caesar, craving revenge for his wife and son, embarks on a personal mission of vengeance in which he will find The Colonel and kill him. When Maurice, Rocket and Luca invite themselves along as Caesar’s bodyguards, this becomes a quest worthy of Apocalypse Now. And much like Martin Sheen’s character in Apocalypse Now, who sets out to find and kill Colonel Kurtz, Caesar winds up being completely surprised by what he finds when he finally reaches The Colonel’s stronghold.
Woody Harrelson was perfect casting to play this film’s villain, a colonel who has declared a holy war against the apes, whom he sees as being a major threat to the very existence of the human race. Harrelson can play a psychopath very well--just watch his performance in Natural Born Killers--but Reeves isn’t interested in having a one dimensional villain twirling his mustache, here. Despite the fact that we never learn his name, the Colonel is a well-rounded out character, just like everyone else in the movie, both ape and human. And it’s just this thoughtful attention to character detail that makes you care about what’s happening on screen.
War for the Planet of the Apes isn’t a movie that was cynically designed to grab and hold your attention, like most of its popcorn flick brethren--instead it was a work of art that was masterfully created in every way, from the creation of its story to the elaborate CGI that gave life to the apes, an effect that looks so good that you just accept them as being real apes. While it delivers on the thrills promised in its title, War for the Planet of the Apes dares to dig deeper into its well-thought-out story, giving us moments of reflection that are almost lyrical in a film that wants to be more than just a simple popcorn film, and it succeeds brilliantly. Matt Reeves has signed on to direct the next Batman film, and given his majestic work on the last two Apes films, I'm really looking forward to seeing his take on the Dark Knight. --SF
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