5 years late to War for the Planet of the Apes, the release of Kingdom has forced me to take a close look at Matt Reeves’ reviled conclusion to the Planet of the Apes prequel trilogy. That’s PREQUEL, not reboot as some, professional movie critics out there have confusingly labelled it.
I am shocked to inform you, that War for the Planet of the Apes, is not only the worst movie of the series, but it is a heavily disappointing pile of a warbling, over dramatic, melancholy rubbish. A script that so desperately tries to grapple with huge themes but due the laziness of the writing, only manages to dry hump them.
The film kicks off with a skirmish between human soldiers and a pack of apes. After the events of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), these troops have been deployed to eradicate the apes for good. When Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his cohorts take victory, the noble ape shows mercy and humanity, sending the prisoners back alive, in the hopes of demonstrating that apes are not savages. They just want to be left alone.
But the humans, predictably, do not return such humanity. During a secret nighttime operation, Caesar’s wife and son are slain by the soldier-in-chief general, (Woody Harrelson). Caesar, wracked with fury, sends the rest of the apes on their voyage to a new home and sets out on a lone quest of vengeance. It seems rather stupid and unlike Caesar to neglect the rest of the apes like this, but he has just lost his wife and son, so I guess I can understand why fury is getting the better of him. Three of the other apes insist on coming along to help him, including the Bornean orangutan, Maurice (Karin Konoval).
This first stage of the film, leading up to when Caesar gets captured and put in the “concentration camp”, is the most interesting – still, sadly, not that interesting. It’s very slow-moving and involves the rather tiring introduction of a young speechless girl who Maurice takes a liking to, and decides to bring along on the revenge quest. The little girl who comes to be named Nova, is in the film much less as a character, but more of a tool to hammer in some thematic elements. She essentially acts as a bastion of empathy through every scene she appears in, from weeping over the death of an ape she met a few minutes ago, to calmly walking into the concentration facility, completely unnoticed or obstructed by anyone, and giving Caesar food and water to drink. Her simply humanity, despite her regression due to the virus, contrasts starkly with the barbaric acts of the colonel, and since her impact on the plot serves only to ensure the colonel will contract the virus (in a very contrived way) it is painfully obvious she’s been lobbed in there to create this very contrast.
This is what I mean about the film dry humping major themes. Such thematic elements simply aren’t wrought intelligently into the narrative, and when the narrative itself is crumbling with plot holes, any attempt by the film maker or the script to say something profound falls profoundly flat, regardless of how much emotion they throw on screen.
The apes also meet another ape who becomes the most annoying character in the film, with the voice of a timid, scared old man he’s used for comic relief but is almost never funny.
Around the mid-way point of the film, the ape-hating colonel has Caesar brought to his office and decides to divulge his entire plan to Casear. What is this… Ape 007? This is the point at which the film starts to career downhill, doing crucial damage to the Planet of the Apes saga. At this point in the narrative, two separate scenes have informed us that some humans have lost the ability of speech. Now we learn from Harrelson’s Colonel that the simian flu Virus – the disease that went global at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) (a much better movie than this), has mutated and is causing humans to lose their ability to speak.
Stop and think please. Why was the very first Planet of the Apes movie so compelling? The shock and the mystery of seeing how humans had switched places with apes, presumably over the course of thousands or even millions of years. The Apes had become intelligent and civilized, they could speak, they had kingdoms. Humans on the other hand, were running around like wild animals and cavemen. Even more shocking was the fact they’d lost the basic ability of speech. And it was especially terrifying to see this through the eyes of George Taylor (Charlton Heston). Especially when he realised that this was the destiny of the human race. But part of the terror and the shock of such reveals, part of what made it so fascinating, was the mystery of it. How many thousands of years had it taken? How many wars? What had happened to humans to cause them to stop using their vocal cords? The audience originally imagines that the inability of humans to speak must have come about over thousands of years, no longer using their vocal chords, slowly degenerating, descending back into the early stages of their evolution. It was such a fascinating and intriguing idea. The human race, slowly but surely regressing.
But no. Now the more “exciting” truth is revealed to us, which is that this simian flu virus, that has wiped out a vast portion of the population, now just so happens to also rob humans of their ability to speak, coincidentally around the same time that a lot of apes (not just Caesar’s cohort) are randomly becoming more intelligent. Talk about cheap contrivances… What an utterly unimaginative and lazy way to condense thousands of years-worth of evolution into the plot of a single film. War for the Planet of the Apes disbands with any intelligent science or ideas on evolution, dumbing everything down so they can squash it into a single shoddy narrative. The awfulness of it is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.
From here on out the the film is littered with contrivances, as huge and as regular as the sand holes that the apes are able to dig in the ground in order to escape the concentration camp. Should I even have been surprised that literally every ape was able to escape the compound before a single human noticed anything – despite the fact there were search beams and guards all over the place? The writers were clearly keen on rushing towards the climax of the film without giving any thought to how ridiculous and incompetent they were making the humans look.
One of the final and worst contrivances comes with the death of Woody Harrelson’s Colonel. The script writers almost created an interesting character here. A man who forced himself to shoot his own son because he’d lost the ability to speak. A man who foresaw the eventual subordination of humanity and was determined not to let that come to be – his answer being to kill the humans who were regressing with the virus, and eventually eradicate all the apes too. Yet, towards the end of the film, when Caesar ultimately decides not to kill the colonel after realising the colonel has contracted the very disease he fears and has lost the ability to speak, he leaves the gun down so the colonel can pick it up himself. While it’s totally understandable that the colonel chooses to kill himself in this scene, what’s incredibly stupid is why he doesn’t shoot Caesar first. After all, Caesar is the most intelligent ape the colonel has ever met, he’s the reason the colonel infiltrated the ape settlement at the beginning of the movie – he didn’t set out to kill Caesar’s wife and son, he set out to kill the leader of the apes. If the colonel is so hell bent on ensuring that humans do not become subordinate to apes in future, why, before taking his life, would he not take out the biggest threat of all – the most intelligent and civilized of apes? From absurdly divulging all his plans to Caesar, to constantly passing over opportunities to kill the very ape that epitomizes what he fears about the future, this final dumb decision of the Colonel relegates him to below even the most forgettable James Bond villain.
All this does not even broach the matter of how the Colonel contracts the virus in the first place. Why would he pick up a random dolly lying in the ape cage if he was so paranoid about the virus? His decisions, from detailing his entire plan to Caesar, to picking up the dolly and to passing over half a dozen good opportunities to kill Caesar make him outrageously stupid. His speech about how apes will use humans as their cattle in the future – while delivered excellently by Woody Harrelson – was way too on the nose, making the film feel more self-aware than it should be, and once again, nullifying the mystery element of the evolution behind Planet of the Apes.
There are plenty more plot holes I could detail, but they’re agonising to reflect on. The snow avalanche towards the end, wiping out a whole army of humans in one go is another huge contrivance, enabling the apes to escape with ease. It also happens so fast and sudden that rather than coming across as epic and spine-tingling, there’s something quite amusing about it that makes one want to roll their eyes.
So many critics have praised this film seemingly because of the emotional stakes attached. But when the script is bursting at the seams with plot holes and shoddy writing, the bombardment of overly dramatic emotion the director throws at you just makes the movie even more irritating to sit through.
For example, Caesar’s decision not to kill the colonel in the climax is filmed in a way that makes it look as if he’s really struggling with the moral decision. Is he going to be civilised and show his humanity? Or is he going to go the route of Koba – the more interesting villain from the previous film that has been haunting Caesar throughout this one? But it’s painfully obvious that Caesar will not kill the colonel at this stage of the narrative. If the colonel were still alive and well, or at least simply injured, Caesar’s grapple between killing his nemesis or letting him live would be a gripping one. But when Caesar knows that the colonel has the very disease that renders him speechless and has sworn to kill anyone who comes to be infected by it, the over-the-top rage acting from Andy Serkis as he presses the gun against the colonel’s forehead is just embarrassing and drags out for too long.
The final straw for me came way before the film lumbered into its final scene. However, to see Caesar slowly slide over and die after having led the apes to the “promised land”, from a wound he received all the way back at the battle in the concentration camp – a place with completely different terrain – it’s impossible not to smirk and roll your eyes. The script writers were clearly trying to emulate the story of Moses a little too hard. Maybe focus a bit more on basic logic next time guys? The absurdly prolonged death of Caesar robbed it of the emotion it should have dealt me, and really emphasised what a dud this film had been right before the credits rolled.
It’s not only the film but the discussion around it which annoys me. Too many film critics have heaped praise on it which it simply doesn’t deserve. It’s embarrassing and cringe-worthy to read reviews like the one by Drew Dietsch, who pronounces War for the Planet of the Apes as ‘the platinum standard for blockbuster film-making’ – actually Drew, it’s quite possibly the lowest bar. Unfortunately these days however, the lowest bar is often the “platinum standard”.
I wish to god, I did not watch this film. Instead of getting me excited for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes – a film I was already looking forward to – it’s knocked my enthusiasm right out of me.
