War for the Plan­et of the Apes

Scowls! Scowls! We got scowls. Get ​’em here while they’re hot. We got big scowls, small scowls, wide scowls, intense scowls, melan­choly scowls and angered scowls. We got those scowls with the ridged fore­heads and pursed lips. We got full-cheeked scowl with the pained thou­sand-yard glare. We got the toothy scowl with pop­ping veins and dap­ples of sweat trick­ling down the brow. We’ve even got – for one time only – the scowl cou­pled with real salt tears, the com­bined per­fec­tion of rage and sor­row. We got them all at the War for the Plan­et of the Apes store down on Hol­ly­wood Blvd.

Yes, Matt Reeves’ War for the Plan­et of the Apes is a seri­ous film about seri­ous apes fight­ing for sur­vival and attempt­ing to wrap their ape brains around human nature in a num­ber of high­ly seri­ous ways. And they ain’t hap­py about it. The sto­ry picks up from the pre­vi­ous instal­ment, 2014’s Dawn of the Plan­et of the Apes, and dou­bles down on the idea that the glob­al hier­ar­chy has shift­ed – now it’s the apes that we like and the humans we hate. The lat­ter had their chance and they muffed it hard. They played god, and god rapped them across the knuckles.

Ape leader Cae­sar (mo-capped to expres­sive per­fec­tion by Andy Serkis) is try­ing his best to curb the killing, offer­ing his main human foe, Woody Harrelson’s omi­nous ​“Colonel”, olive branch after olive branch. The Colonel is hav­ing none of it. A ges­ture of peace becomes a sign of weak­ness, result­ing in the mas­sacre of Caesar’s wife and child. The talk­ing ape mes­si­ah is now dri­ven by the malev­o­lent blood revenge he spent the entire pre­vi­ous film con­vinc­ing his cohort, Koba (Toby Kebbell), to resist at all costs. He must go on a jour­ney, and he must go alone, as only he can exor­cise the ape demons locked with­in him.

The intent of the film is noble, and even though the spe­cial effects exem­pli­fy the heady won­ders of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, there’s still some­thing nag­ging­ly syn­thet­ic about it all. It’s hard to imag­ine how these semi-humanoid apes could look more real, and each close-up of an ape face offers a mind-warp­ing vor­tex of insane micro detail and won­der­ment. It’s the hairs, the fol­li­cles, the skin bur­nish­es, the folds, the scars, they just look as close to real­i­ty as would be human­ly pos­si­ble. You look at these images and just see the vast teams of artists bat­tling to ren­der each frame as close to pho­to­graph­ic per­fec­tion as they can.

And yet, it’s a cry­ing shame that these immac­u­late cre­ations are served by a sto­ry­line which, in dig­i­tal effects terms, feels about as real as The Lawn­mow­er Man. As Cae­sar and his band of plucky cohorts tramp through snowy climbs in search of the Colonel’s secret lair, they stum­ble upon handy plot devices along the way. There’s even a ran­dom lev­i­ty gen­er­a­tor in the form of Steve Zahn’s lov­able lum­mox, Bad Ape. When Cae­sar final­ly gets his one-on-one with the big man, Har­rel­son is giv­en the dis­mal task of spout­ing dense expo­si­tion for five min­utes straight. He does his best to inject a sense of urgency, excite­ment and rum­bling grav­i­tas into scads of bloat­ed back­sto­ry, but it turns his char­ac­ter into a cold sto­ry mech­a­nism. The film spends so much time try­ing to fool the eye, that it entire­ly for­gets to fool brain.

Its oth­er prob­lem is an awk­ward, smash-and-grab atti­tude to 20^th cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal atroc­i­ties which val­ues brash, fun-size visu­al ref­er­ences above any more nuanced explo­ration. Som­bre Holo­caust iconog­ra­phy is mashed togeth­er with the nation­al­ist hubris and fol­ly of Viet­nam which is then fused with the expe­ri­ence of Amer­i­can slav­ery and the dev­as­ta­tion of the AIDS cri­sis. Which is all great, except that you’re spend­ing the whole time won­der­ing why the apes don’t just climb over the fences and run away from all the hate.

It also makes some very cack-hand­ed movie ref­er­ences, and for those unable to spot the par­al­lels between Harrelson’s rogue mil­i­tary mad man and a sim­i­lar fig­ure from a 1970s clas­sic, then it’s lit­er­al­ly graffiti’d on a wall for you lat­er on. Maybe it all comes back to the film’s mud­dled intent, a desire to make this more than just your gar­den vari­ety effects block­buster and leave a more pro­found impres­sion. And while mat­ters are pal­pa­bly sedate and point­ed­ly ​“emo­tion­al” between the open­ing and cli­mac­tic brawls (with the focus trained on intel­lec­tu­al rather than phys­i­cal clash­es) the film nev­er quite man­ages to realise its vault­ing ambitions.