Review of War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) by Jim H — 30 Jul 2017

Having not remembered a whole lot about the two predecessors of War for the Planet of the Apes due to the three and six years since their respective releases, I couldn't really say that I was excited for this, but I certainly wasn't averse to it.

While it has been a franchise with more brains and a little more entertainment value than comparable fare, this reboot series always lacked what was in my eyes the requisite self-awareness for such content, and this final installment carries on with such a tone in ways that I didn't expect.

It's both the most derivative and the most ambitious of this reboot series, having a clear vision but suffering from black-and-white characterizations and ideas that have been done better elsewhere.

It also maintains the strength of the series' visual effects, technical filmmaking, and acting, but the dialogue and misplaced attempts at comic relief are hackneyed. The biggest issue here, though, is that War for the Planet of the Apes is boring.

Not kind of boring, not sometimes boring-it's boring. The filmmaking does a good job at creating a world, but what's the point of a world if it has no substance in it and isn't approached with any livelihood? It seems as if there are two types of blockbusters: those obsessed with parallels to 9/11 and those obsessed with parallels to the Holocaust.

This movie falls firmly into the latter, albeit with some retreads of Apocalypse Now, The Great Escape, etc. (insert ape puns here). It's a decently done conclusion that somehow manages to feel like nothing, featuring the remaining ape characters, led by Caesar (Andy Serkis) in their escape from and rebellion against humanity.

What's odd, though, is that humanity seems to have taken a sudden turn to being nothing other than simplified and evil as if to make the irony of rooting for apes instead of people easier to obtain.

Director/co-writer Matt Reeves has strapped down on providing an oppressively dull tone but without adequate reasoning, and entirely without the justification for a 140-minute runtime. With all of the themes and morality having been sucked out of the franchise, Reeves and co-writer Mark Bomback have made all humans evil, all apes admirable, all scenes dreary, and all pacing slow with little to no gray areas to be seen or discussed.

In fact, I was rather shocked in how much of a "that's it?" quality the material held, as if its script had been paraphrased by a parent explaining its story and meaning to a small child.

This franchise has always been a pretty obvious allegory, so treating it poorly can result in subtext becoming plain old text with the audience having no real lines to read between, as is the case here.

There's little variance in emotion or approach to the script from a directorial perspective except when there's a comic relief gag thrown in, which jolts the tone to cartoonish extremes for a few seconds without earning such shifts due to the movie's total lack of self-awareness elsewhere.

Despite my having enjoyed the two previous movies, I simply couldn't bring myself to care about anything happening. At all. The positives for War for the Planet of the Apes are what you would expect: a strong score from Michael Giacchino; outstanding visual effects; very good cinematography; and a grand sense of scope at times.

But all of these aspects are placed onto nothing, and the experience itself feels so hollow, and surprisingly so. It's almost impressive to seem this ambitious and obligatory at the same time. I very rarely ask, "Did I see the same movie as those who loved this?", but that applies here.

It's all icing and no cake, and the icing here is really just snow, dust, and tropes done before without much going for them. Monkey see, monkey do, I guess. Decent finale, though. 4.5/10, lame, C-, below average, etc.