War for the Planet of the Apes Review: War for the planet of the Apes is one of those movies which embraces its title unapologetically.
War For The Planet of the Apes Review starts with soldiers in a green forest with nicknames on their helmets, marching toward the enemy through the brush in style.
War For The Planet of the Apes Review: Summary
After the very traumatic in fighting which served as the centerpiece for “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his fellow apes have almost become legends, the kinda animals in the woods that soldiers speak about with hushed tones. None of the soldiers know exactly where Caesar is or his plans, but we will come to learn that his major focus is survival.
Another interesting aspect of the movie is that Caesar very often seems to just be seeking peace, but he’s pulled back into war by humans who refuse to allow coexistence with a species that might be their superior. That’s exactly what happens when a character known only as The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) attacks the apes camp, killing some of Caesar’s family. Now the ape learns another human emotion that often leads to tragedy: vengeance.
How “War For The Planet of the Apes Review” unfolds from here is relatively simple, especially for the often plot-laden genre of the summer blockbuster. One of the many brilliant elements of the script by Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves is its forced perspective. Other than that opening sequence, we stay almost entirely with only Caesar as he works his way to the mysterious human base with a few other simians and a mute girl they find along the way that they name Nova (Amiah Miller). For the midsection of the film, “War for the Planet of the Apes review” also recalls a relative of the war movie in that it starts to feel like a modern Western, a road movie about a group of heroes riding to the town that has been overrun by the black coats. Again, the focus is remarkable. Dozens of other movies would have bounced us narratively back and forth between the Colonel and Caesar. It’s much stronger and easier to identify with Caesar because we’re on the journey with him, knowing only what he knows, but the pressure to bring the human star back before the hour-mark must have been high.
War for the Planet of the Apes is a mirror to what human beings are like in 2017 as much as anything else. It is about infighting and vengeance. It is about loss and the need for people to hold on tightly to that which keeps them going. When our support systems are wrenched away, we respond with anger and violence. And when there are things in the world that we don’t understand, we respond with fear and battles for control. All of this and so much more is woven through “War for the Planet of the Apes” in a way that often doesn’t hit you until hours or days later. While it may be a few beats too long, especially in its multiple endings, it’s a shockingly memorable movie, the kind that gets better as you dissect and discuss how much it does right after the lights have gone up.