“War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017) is the third movie of a trilogy that I dare say is one of the strongest trilogies ever put to the big screen. Matt Reeves directed this ape epic after having directed its predecessor “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014). His vision and direction of Andy Serkis in “War” puts the capstone on Caesar’s character arch that truly tests his limits with both humans and apes. It’s a touching and cruel story about this advanced chimpanzee who seeks revenge on The Colonel (Woody Harrelson). It’s a well written story that gets deep into philosophical and personal conflict with what it really means to be human and ape.
My favorite part from this movie is the very first scene where we see apes and humans fighting in the woods. I personally think this is one of the strongest hooks of any movie in the last decade. It shows “guerrilla” fighting at its finest with both sides using the trees and terrain around them to outsmart each other. It gets very brutal with opposing forces slaughtering each other with bullets and spears. This is my kind of battle scene where both tactics and intensity merge flawlessly.
This leads me to say that that was the only time we see a battle, not a war between apes and humans. I would really have loved to have seen a third act battle where this war could have taken full swing as what we saw in the beginning, but the film takes us on a different direction that was more personal for Caesar. I wouldn’t have put the third act in the direction Reeves did, but it works for what it is. It just takes the “War” out of “War for the Planet of the Apes.” “Dawn” showed us an intense battle scene with Koba and the apes attacking the humans with machine guns and apes on armored vehicles, and I was hoping that we would see something like that on steroids in this film. That’s really my only complaint. Still good though. Whew! Dodged that spoiler!
I’m still amazed that the film crew didn’t train apes to act in this movie. Fox’s visual effects and CGI is so good in this film that every strand of fur and wrinkle on theses apes are so convincing, particularly the eyes. All three films are like this. Their attention to detail truly made me forget that these apes are performed by actors in motion-capture suits. This just shows how far CGI has come in the last decade. Human faces are still tricky to look convincing, but ape faces are very much to the point where anyone can believe they’re real. Maybe an ape will get an Oscar nomination, and then be disqualified when the academy finds out that a human gave the performance.
Andy Serkis as Caesar in “War for the Planet of the Apes”
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