Review of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) by Owen B — 20 Aug 2017

War for the Planet of the Apes has very intelligent film components in terms of directing, acting and writing. What makes WAR of the PotA so amazing is that the movie is able to crawl its way out of having to tell such an interesting and well-organized, detailed sophisticated plot by focusing much more on the background and mostly telling the story without having to rely on dialogue all the time. The suspense and action sequences and special effects are groundbreaking and the movie doesn't have to build up any dialogue in the form of complicated long sentences to tell an interesting story, cause here it's all about just apes and humans fighting each other now that all trust is lost. The apes talk out very simple things in rough ape-y voices and their goals are really simple: to just survive and find a good home to survive in. The humans on the other hand want the apes dead to regain their domination of the earth, and while I get that Woody Harrelson's character Colonel who is the movie's villain is a lot like Trump wanting a giant wall to prevent fluxes of "dirty" immigrant people coming in with their diseases (which could be a metaphor for the terrorist motives that a fraction of Syrian refugees carry in order to honor ISIS), I felt that the movie didn't properly display the wall at all, cause we only see the apes using bucket brigade of rocks to make a wall, and also the wall isn't really talked about that much in the movie, rather the wall seems more like just an excuse for why the Alpha Omega militia led by Colonel wants to keep the apes locked up in cages and oppress them into slavery. I love the irony in the scene where the Alpha Omega men play Star-Spangled Banner then charge towards the apes and put them to work in chains, as I always thought the Banner once was a symbol of freedom and liberty. ONCE.

I also really liked the movie's Tarzan-like component of adding in a human girl, Nova, who tags along with the apes, it just makes the movie more ironic since girls are usually stereotyped into hating associating with wild animals. But Nova is an exception, because she is a wild animal. And don't forget about Bad Ape, he's a great character.

All in all, War for the Planet of the Apes is one of the BEST threequels ever made and is even better than the first two movies in the trilogy and one of the best American movies ever made. Just like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, WAR successfully satirizes the current foreign policy crisis in the United States because while DAWN draws parallels to Americans arguing whether to use diplomatic solution OR military action to deal with their Middle Eastern enemies, WAR draws parallels to Trump's wall building plans and ISIS trying to invade democratic Western nations in order to conquer vanishing natural resources like food, water and land.