‘War For The Planet Of The Apes’ Concludes The Best Trilogy No One Is Talking About
Grim, intense, and marvelous, the newest Apes film, and trilogy, is well worth celebrating.
Justice for the Planet of the Apes movies! Sure, they get good reviews with critics and fans, and yes, they they do well at the box office, but somehow and someway, these movies aren’t appreciated enough.
These are amazing films that should be widely revered, particularly 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of The Apes, and now this year’s War for the Planet of The Apes, a grim and extremely intense prison-escape drama that caps off the trilogy in epic fashion.
But somehow they still aren’t getting their just due…
Maybe it’s because the themes and ideas addressed in these movies are so dark and uncomfortable. In Dawn, the movie focused on the inevitability of conflict and how these miscommunication can result in war. In War, we’re right in the middle of that mess, with the apes on the defense while the humans stage raids meant to kill them off once and for all.
Leading the apes is Caesar, the chimpanzee played by Andy Serkis, in what is an amazing feat of motion capture performance. We as viewers find ourselves connecting with these CGI creations over and over again, which is another part of what makes these films so impressive.
This type of technology is pretty much perfected in War, seamless and so real that it skips past unnatural-looking and goes straight to incredible. But this realism is what makes War even more terrifying.
Caesar and his friends are subjected to a great deal of torment in a prison camp, run by Woody Harrelson’s army colonel. Most of War concerns Caesar trying to deliver his people (the apes) to freedom, a rescue that director Matt Reeves creates with both tension and humor. This lighter, funny aspect comes in the form of a new character named Bad Ape, who was arguably one of my favorite parts of this movie and definitely takes the grim edge off when the movie needs it.
Take a look at this teaser clip of Bad Ape:
Dawn is still my personal favorite out of the trilogy, but that doesn’t make War any less as awesome. War is a smaller, more compact movie, and is more of a thriller than both Rise and Dawn. Throughout this trilogy we have watched apes struggle and fail, overcome fear, realize strengths, and learn to grow and change. It’s almost funny how important and dear these apes become to us by the end of the film.
War for the Planet of the Apes is incredibly exciting, though it is a lot smaller in scale than many other summer blockbusters, which is probably why we movies haven’t always given these movies their due credit. They get a bit lost in the shuffle with the Transformers and Spidermans of the world. We should praise Caesar, and all of his other ape friends, as often as we can.
