OVP: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

Film: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Stars: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn
Director: Matt Reeves
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We live in an era of the revived franchise, an era focused on how we can mine our childhoods (or our parents' childhoods) for any bit of nostalgia.  It's an understandable concept (in the era of Donald Trump, who wouldn't want to reach back for happier times?), but it also makes for relatively boring film.  At best, many of the superhero and live-action retreads that have come to our summer blockbusters are middling at best, rarely finding something new to say that rivals the original.  Frequently, they suck the joy out of what is in front of them, making something more violent-and-edgy (every filmmaker appears to have seen The Dark Knight and is using that as a template).  So it's still surprising to me that of all of the franchise revivals, it was Planet of the Apes that somehow genuinely got it right.  We haven't had a chance to review the third installment yet on this site, a fact I'm going to correct today, but it's worth remembering what a joke these seemed to be when the first picture came out in 2011 (I literally remember people laughing when the title card came out the first time I saw a trailer for it at the theater), and how Andy Serkis's work (and some brilliant special effects artists) crafted together a truly compelling trilogy (and now that Disney owns Fox, almost certainly they'll go back to extending and pulling the franchise into a host of different directions, lessening this impact, but let's focus on the here-and-now).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place two years after the ape uprising in San Francisco, where Koba's faction went up against Caesar's (Serkis).  Caesar is hardened from the ape he was two years earlier, frequently trying to find a foothold in the war against the humans, which increasingly looks like something the apes are winning (even though most of this film itself is focused on one particular battle rather than a larger war).  We don't know why we get this feeling until later into the film, when the main human antagonist the Colonel (Harrelson) reveals that the Simian Flu (alluded to in Rise of the Planet of the Apes) has mutated, and the humans infected with it are becoming primitive and unable to speak.  Thanks to his own prejudice (confiscating a human toy from Caesar), the Colonel infects himself with the flu and kills himself before he has a chance to start to show the symptoms.  In  an epic battle, Caesar himself dies as a result of wounds he sustains, but not before he leads the apes, as well as a young girl, to a promised land, a place that surely is intended to be a callback to the original series (though there's problems if you want to get your inner film nerd on with the timeline), as we now have characters like Cornelius & Nova ready for Charlton Heston to land on the planet.

The film feels more cloistered than the prior pictures, and more reliant on the audience having invested in Caesar and his ape brethren than the previous installations, where we got a heavy amount of back story to invest in what was happening onscreen.  This is a risk for people who are casual film-watchers.  After all, if you're like me and haven't revisited the films other than your initial watch of the movies in theaters, you might struggle to be invested in what's happening in the flick, or honestly leave confused.  This isn't the fault of the directors, and it's not a small problem, but there were moments in the movie I felt like it almost needed to adapt to the new "binge-watching" strategy employed by Netflix where you need all of the titles at once, rather than several years apart.

But the movie is otherwise terrific.  Serkis is excellent, finding a core to Caesar that makes him stand alongside Gollum & Kong as some of his best work.  Few actors imbue their creations with such sensitivity and nuance, and Serkis manages to do that without even showing his face.  Harrelson is also great (though lately, when is he not?), giving the best performance by a human in the entire revived series.  I loved the special effects work-we've already seen what brilliance they can do with Serkis & Caesar (as well as supporting characters like Steve Zahn's Bad Ape), but the battle effects are on-point as well, with an army of men & apes fighting against (and sometimes alongside) each other.  I still feel like the second movie hit the biggest heights, but this is a strong closer to a trilogy of films that had no business being as good as it was, and one that should stand apart in a similar way to the Nolan Batman movies distinguishing themselves from the rest of the franchise.