Review of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) by Healingtoolbox — 07 Aug 2018

Much better than I expected. I didn't want to see another war movie even if it was apes and humans killing each other non-stop. A much more resonant story unfolds than my expectation.

I practice using Josh Whedon's rubric of "which genre does the script draw its power from?" In this case Matt Reves draws on three movie genres/stories: Apocalypse now war movies, Sergio Leone/Kurosawa western movies and the Bible story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt to the promised land. Matt says almost as much in the first half hour of the director's commentary. What makes this possible to cement the power from three different genre sources into one script is finding the emotional richness in each scene, in the shooting process and enhancing the emotional richness in the editing-revising. Matt talks about this in the director's commentary also. Quite a striking writing-directing effort, high art.