The Ape-ocalypse Concludes…
*No Spoilers – except for the previous two films*

Let me start by saying that War for the Planet of the Apes was not a bad film. Regardless of what I write after this, I still enjoyed this and it is still a perfectly good action packed film that will leave you engrossed all the way through it. It is just for me, the new reboot of the Planet of the Apes films have been masterpieces and since this is the finale of it, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed with the story that they chose to conclude it with.

When Rise of the Planet of the Apes first came out in 2011, I was a little sceptical. Following Tim Burton’s mediocre Planet of the Apes film, I was unsure how I felt about another reboot so soon. I was expecting them to reboot it eventually, but, just like the Spiderman films, there seemed to be a reboot not long after the previous failed performance. However, I still went to the cinema to see it, and I was amazed. I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film. The story of Caesar and how it lead to the ape revolt as well as the Simian Flu virus that would eventually wipe out mankind, left us feeling that it was a great transition between normal everyday life, and the actual Planet of the Apes that Charlton Heston would eventually land on years in the future. It explained everything perfectly and it was an incredibly enjoyable film. I can’t actually fault it at all. That bit when Caesar, Maurice, Buck, and Rocket are all standing on the San Francisco tram cart’s roof, was the absolute bollocks. Caesar forming his little crew and leading the apes across the Golden Gate Bridge was superbly done. My personal favourite part was when Koba, complete with his haggard face, walked up to the guy in the helicopter and pushed it over the edge. I thought “this character is a total badass! I hope we get to see him more in the sequel”.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes came a few years later in 2014, and this film was fantastic. I was expecting great things mainly because of how much I really enjoyed the previous one, and I was not disappointed. Dawn is one of few sequels that I think outshine the original (alone with Terminator 2), which is am impressive feat. I loved the style of this film and how it was a post apocalyptic, dealing with the enemy without (Gary Oldman the some of the other humans) as well as the enemy within (Koba). Koba was such a brilliantly executed character who was in fact a total badass (as I have previously stated). I wanted to see more of him and Dawn did not disappoint. That moment when he was riding on horseback duel-wielding machine guns and screaming at the top of his lungs, was awesome. As well as the build up to the final show down between Caesar and Koba was really intense. They made excellent hidden references to the previous film, if you had the eye to spot them.
Not only were the action sequences superb, but the story was enjoyable and kept you engaged throughout the entire film. Those two or so hours just flew by. Overall Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was fucking amazing.


Maybe it was because of how good these two films were, that I was expecting the same level of class with War for the Planet of the Apes. I had read that War was going to be the “last” one of the series. They could easily continue the story on, but I think it would be a bad move. But the fact is that this film is the finale of the trilogy and so it needs to go out with something special. I was expecting the film to be basically the second half of Dawn but extended over the length of a whole film; an action packed battle between man and ape. Lots of guns and lots of ape deaths (which is always sad to see).
While the introduction to the film is in fact this (the film begins with a battle between the two), the rest of the film takes a completely different turn to what I was expecting. Maybe it was because it had the word “War” in the film, that we were expecting it to be an actual war film, but War for the Planet of the Apes is actually something entirely different.

Now I don’t want to go into spoiler territory, so I will give a very basic outline of the plot and certain bits that do not give anything away, but basically Caesar and his clan have been trying to live out their lives following the mess that Koba had left behind. When Gary Oldman got through to whoever was on the other end of the line in Dawn, it brought forth a large human military unit, lead by the Colonel (not Colonel Sanders, although that would have been wicked) played by Woody Harrelson. The Colonel has (for some reason) declared war on ape-kind, and even though Caesar has tried to make peace with them to stop the bloodshed, the Colonel is not having none of it. He hates every ape he sees, from chimpan-a to chimpanzee.
Not only does he want to kill Caesar and destroy the ape colony Caesar has been trying to build up and keep say over the course of the last few films, but he also employs a few apes and gorillas as “Donkeys” who act as scouts and general skivvies, which leads to some great moments where you have a human ruled ape against one of the free ones like Caesar himself.

Anyway, something happens and Caesar goes on a mission to kill the Colonel. Joined by his faithful companions Maurice and Rocket (both characters have been built up throughout the series) as well as Luca the Gorilla (who was in Dawn but not Rise – RIP Buck), the crew travel across the snowy wasteland to find the Colonel and his men.

I did not see this coming. I was expecting a large ape force battling the soldiers, but it is not an overly big deal to be honest. This film was just not what I thought it would be. It is not a bad thing at all as, now that I have War, I can honestly say that all three films are completely different from one another. I suppose thinking back it would have been too similar to Dawn if they did have enormous ape vs human battle sequences throughout the film, so choosing to go into a different direction is not necessarily a bad thing, I just think that the execution of this film was not at the same level as Rise or Dawn.


There are a few new characters introduced into this. Lake, who is a female ape in Caesar’s clan and a love interest for Blue Eyes; Caesar’s son. Winter, who is an albino gorilla.
There is Bad Ape, who is an ape they discover on their journey to find the Colonel, who helps build the lore of the Planet of the Apes. You see Bad Apecan talk. He does not know sign language like all the other apes in Caesar’s group, but due to the Simian Flu affecting apes and making them smarter, he has learned to speak from listening to humans during his time in the zoo. It is at this point that Maurice makes an interesting point and questions if there are other apes all over the world that are like Bad Ape, therefore hinting that there are most likely and so it is why apes dominate the entire world years later (except for the Forbidden Zone). Bad Ape provides some comedy to the film. We had people near us who were absolutely wetting themselves at whatever he said. I think that if he was not in fact an ape, then he would have been rather annoying and possibly been a rather Michael Bay-esc eye rolling moment, but the fact that he was a talking ape made him so much more charming enjoyable to watch.
Another new character is a little girl they find in a cabin. She cannot speak and although she just mainly tags along for the ride, her storyline (and why she cannot speak) is incredibly interesting and help further build the world that leads into the original film.
I am a bit on the cusp as to whether this is a good thing or not, as on the one hand they are limited to sticking with trying to bridge the gap between this series and the original one, which can sometimes lead to some wishy-washy results, which we do see in this film, where as on the other hand, they have dome some amazing links. For example, the little girl is called Nova, who is the name of the woman that Charlton Heston meets years later. Cornelius is the name of Caesar’s son in this series, but in the original Cornelius is the leader of the apes, so it is clear that he eventually takes over Caesar’s group and leads them. This is what I mean by making it a little wishy-washy, as you’d expect it to be hundreds (if not thousands) of years after the fall of man and civilisation created by apes (think the Statue of Liberty is pretty much buried in sand at the time of the original film), but if these are in fact the same characters, then the events of the original film only happen maybe about 25 years later. Maybe it is a name thing and Nova uses the name for her children or her grandchildren, and Cornelius uses the same for his, in a similar way to the Roman Empire leaders, or the Targaryen dynasty in Game of Thrones. I did want to see Dr. Zaius show up, so since he didn’t, prehaps that hints that the events of the original film does not happen for years in the future.
Or maybe they just threw it in as a little nod to the original, similar to how they delivered the “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” line that they used in Rise.

These are just little nit picky things that do not affect the film what-so-ever. These are not the reason I am disappointed in it. I will have to be careful not to spoil anything with my explanation. The main reason why I felt a little let down by this film was because of various reason; the main antagonists (both the human one and the Gorilla one) doesn’t have any real resolution. They are great at building up the story throughout the film, but the ending feels a little bit of frustrating. We want Caesar to give that human ruled Gorilla what for, considering he has been a colossal arsehole throughout the film, but it never comes.
The actual story of what the Colonel is doing and why he is getting his prisoners to build a wall, is a little strange and unnecessary. There is a big battle sequence that takes place, but it is not between Ape and Humans, which I found to be a little disappointing. The apes themselves are just caught in the process fire, and the final result of this battle is a little silly and a quick excuse to get rid of what they no longer needed in the story.

There are a few characters that you kind of felt needed to die in order to help make this more definitive as the final film in the series, and if it was me, I would have killed a lot more major characters off. One character who does die, their death felt a little out of the blue and a bit shit to be honest, almost as if they did not really know what to do with the character. They tried to make it a really moving moment, but the scene they were making reference to had only happened a few moments earlier, and not enough time had passed for it to sink it and really affect us.
There is, however, one scene earlier in the film that did really move me and was done brilliantly. I can imagine that there will be a lot of people who might shed a tear at that moment in time.

This was the thing about War for the Planet of the Apes; regardless of what I have said already, the film was still good. It had some great moments in it that were well written and acted, but it never reached the height of the previous films and so it felt a little bit disappointing.
I have heard from other people who saw it that it was a great ending to the series, but I think they could have done a lot better with it.


Imagine IF Caesar died and as he was dying he drew in blood that symbol from Dawn which was the window of his attic room from Rise. That would have been the amazing. I really felt that other than a few moments, they really didn’t link it back to the other films. I feel that for a finale, especially for a trilogy like this, then it needs to bring everything together and really link it all well. Dawn did a fantastic job relating to Rise, and while War does do some links to Dawn (such as referencing a few things Koba says and Rocket speaking about his son dying), they never made any references to Rise. I would have probably liked it to have gone back to the beginning, to really make the audience remember how far Caesar has come. But that is just me. I often think with most films; “Why didn’t they come to me and ask me to write it?”, as this was the same with Predators and with Alien: Covenant – they are good ideas that are just poorly executed. I often feel like with with sequels and I never did with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. That film just did everything right, and I am a little disheartened that I came away from War thinking that I could have done it better.

One last little nit-pick was that Rise and Dawn both began and ended with a close up of Caesar’s eyes (well, his mother’s at the beginning of Rise), which allows you to really stitch the films together nicely. You could easily watch Rise and at the end when it slowly zooms into Caesar’s eyes, then cut to the beginning of Dawn when it slowly zooms out of Caesar’s eyes, and now he is covered in war paint and looks quality. Dawn even ended in the exact same way by slowly zooming into Caesar’s eyes. It was because of this I was expecting War to begin and end the same way, but they didn’t. Instead we are treated to a little introduction briefing telling us of the events of Rise, Dawn and the build up to War, which I felt was a little needless as they could have easily just mentioned the events between Dawn and War in conversation. It just felt a little sloppy from the get-go, but again this is just a little nit-pick because I am such a fan boy of this rebooted series.

Let’s not end this on such a down note, because as I have said, War is not a bad film at all.
So, as for the CGI, you know from the get-go that the effects are going to be amazing. It is almost a given and so you feel as if you don’t want to even mention it, but there was a point in this film when I was watching it and completely forgot that they were not humans. The effects are so well done (as they have been throughout this trilogy) that you can easily lose yourself in it and just see the digitally enhanced apes as real people. It has been the same throughout this series, but War really does make its audience lose themselves in the characters in this way.
Once again the sound effects are perfectly executed as they were in the previous film. It was loud right when it needed to be and made the action moments that much more intense.

Overall, I came a way from War of the Planet of the Apes feeling a little disappointed, but maybe that is because I was maybe excepting too much. It was not the type of film I was expecting and since the previous two films were amazing, I was kind of hoping it would be on the same level, if not greater considering that Dawn was a better film that Rise (although Rise is still a wonderful picture).
But for anyone who is not like me (which is pretty much 99.9% of the population), I think you will enjoy War for the Planet of the Apes. It is not the best ending that they could have done, and I think that even after you see it, you might agree with me that perhaps it feels a little unmonumental, since we have been with these characters for the last three films and have watch them develop and change over the course of the series. I think that this is the only major flaw that this film has.
The rest of the film is engaging and enjoyable enough to keep your attention throughout the entirety of it. As far as films go, you can do a lot worse than War of the Planet of the Apes.

And so with that marks the end of this series. It was a roller-coaster ride that really did have you on the edge of your seat throughout. I fear for what Hollywood might make next with regards to it. Will they make another sequel that continues the story? Or will they reboot it again? Personally I think that maybe they should leave it alone, but we know that it is never the case. So we can expect something in the future from this franchise, it is just a question of what? We can only hope that it is the musical…

 

 

 

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