This being the 9th Planet of the Apes film, I’m continually amazed by the mileage that 20th Century Fox has squeezed out of this concept. However, this is a rare instance when I prefer the reboot series over the original series. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is my favorite of the franchise and Dawn is also pretty damn good. Some people say that these movies are prequels to the original Planet of the Apes, but that doesn’t actually make any sense. In fact, the continuity of this whole franchise doesn’t make any sense, so I just stopped thinking about it (I considered making a flow chart illustrating why it doesn’t make sense, but aint nobody got time for that). If anything, Rise is a kinda-sorta remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn is a kinda-sorta remake of Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Since Battle is where the old series concluded, that means that War would have to would have to go into uncharted territory in terms of plot. Unfortunately, they seem to have run out of ideas and the film is largely just a rehash of elements from Rise and Dawn.
When last we left our monkey king Caesar and his minions, they were preparing for war after a distress signal had been sent to the military during the events of Dawn. Well, we never really get that war. The military shows up (led by crazy-ass Woody Harrelson, who steals the film), but they manage to capture almost all of the Apes in off-camera-scenes. Then it’s up to Caesar and a couple of his buddies to rescue the rest of them….but they fail and get captured too. Then the rest of the film plays out a lot like Rise with Caesar leading an ape revolt against their captors. We have seen this shit before. If you have seen the entire franchise, you have seen it multiple times and that’s particularly sad since this was an opportunity to go in a direction not seen in the original series.
The film also suffers from pacing and tonal issues. This clocks in at nearly 2 and ½ hours and it feels much longer. I would estimate that about 40 minutes could have been cut without really losing anything. The damn thing is just boring and crawls through plot points that are just regurgitated from previous films. Also, unlike Rise and Dawn, there isn’t really a central human character. I think Harrelson’s character is the only human with more than two lines and he doesn’t even show up for quite a while. At this point, Caesar is the only ape that is particularly articulate and most of them still rely on sign language. With such a focus on the apes rather than the humans, that means that we spend much of the film watching apes talk to each other with hand gestures. The film would have been wise to show us the story from Harrelson’s perspective rather than subject us to hours of monkeys playing charades.
The tone of this film is fucking bleak. I’m not opposed to big franchise movies going the serious route, but this just goes overboard and takes itself way too damn seriously. It felt like the same writer got gigs to write a new Apes movie and a remake of Platoon, but he got drunk one night and decided to write them as the same film. It just isn’t any fun. Oddly, though, there is one annoying comic-relief ape that shows up out of nowhere and might as well be named Studio Note. This guy always seems to be having a good time even when horrible shit is going on around him and I’m surprised the other apes didn’t kill him just to shut him the fuck up. It would be like if Jar Jar Binks showed up in Apocalypse Now to exclaim “me so scared, Marlon Brando is cwazy!!!” The annoyance is almost a nice diversion from the overall grimness of the film, but that’s not exactly a compliment.
There are positives. As I mentioned, Woody Harrelson is great (as usual) and his character is a scary bastard with an intriguing back story. Wish we had more screen time with him. The effects are also amazing. I know that I constantly express my hatred of CGI, but there are situations where it is called for and this is one of them. While the makeup effects in the old movies are impressive, they were still just humans in costumes and, therefore, couldn’t move like apes. In this, they are believable. I also liked that they threw in an explanation for why (in the original Planet) humans eventually devolved to being mute and stupid (more so than normal). On a technical level, the film is great to look at and the performances are solid overall. It is just a slog to sit through.
While not awful, I am disappointed with this. I’m aware that I have posted a lot of negative reviews lately and assumed that this would help break that streak, but nope. It seems that the studio just didn’t know what to do with the concept now that they are out of source material to ape (ha!). I think it’s time for the apes franchise to go back on the shelf for another decade or two until the next inevitable remake/reboot. In the meantime, the director of this (Matt Reeves) is moving on to helming the Batman franchise and, considering that he turned Planet of the Apes into a more somber version of The fucking Deer Hunter, I’m sure his vision for Batman will be a lighthearted joyride.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_for_the_Planet_of_the_Apes#/media/File:War_for_the_Planet_of_the_Apes_poster.jpg
