Monday 28 August 2017

War For The Planet Of The Apes (2017) - Movie Review


Of all the sci-fi tentpole films that have reached our screens in the last few years, including the myriad of comic book-related fare, no singular series has given more credibility to the genre as a whole like the Planet Of The Apes prequels have managed. Hell, just the fact that we have not one but two prequels from this series that are not a complete embarrassment to the license is proof enough that these are some special-ass movies. Through a combination of legitimately ground-breaking special effects work and some truly inspired scripting, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes have a very special place in the film industry as it stands today. If we ever grow a sense that the Oscars actually matter in any real way, and decide to end the stigma concerning ‘genre films’ and how they mostly get relegated to the special effects categories in terms of nominations, you’d be hard-pressed to find two better pieces of evidence than those.
 
Since the cyclical nature of cinema releases means that quite a few of 2014’s releases are getting follow-ups this year, I’m definitely curious to see if this film is able to live up to the series standard thus far. What I was not expecting, even from these filmmakers, was a result that manages to outdo the previous installments. How is that even possible? Well, let’s take a look.

The plot: Two years after the events of Dawn, Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his tribe of genetically-enhanced apes are still trying to leave a peaceful existence. However, in the wake of an attack by human military troop Alpha-Omega, led by the genocidal Colonel (Woody Harrelson), Caesar’s patience has run out. He sets out to find the Colonel and get revenge for what he did, but as his mission carries on, he fears that he has become the very thing that he has spent so long fighting against.

Serkis retains his place as the king of mo-cap, furthering Caesar’s well-intentioned quest for peace by emphasizing just how much his fight has worn him down over time. Karin Konoval furthers Maurice’s stance as Caesar’s moral compass, resulting in some very powerful exchanges between them, and his new position as the child’s guardian gives her more to do within the plot; this will never not be a good thing, especially with characters this well-defined. Speaking of the child, Amiah Miller’s place as the token human of the main group not only works amazingly well alongside the apes, but her presence ends up serving as a hopeful but no less grim reminder of how far her own species has fallen since the Simian flu outbreak.
 
Terry Notary, while being saddled with a rather unfortunate bit of bodily humour (I’m surprised it took this long for more traditional ape poop-flinging to be featured, but then again, I honestly hoped it just wouldn’t), fits nicely in the main group as the main muscle Rocket, same with Adamthwaite as Luca. Harrelson, in absolute contrast to his warm and inviting demeanour from back in The Edge Of Seventeen, manages to create a new high point in a series full of complex antagonists, playing the ‘God complex’ card in a way that is at once horrifying and horrifyingly understandable. If there’s a weak point in the cast list, it’s most definitely Steve Zahn as Bad Ape; honestly, Zahn being cast in this role makes way too much sense in hindsight, given his character serves as the comic relief in a film that in no way whatsoever needed comedic levity. Well, at least not to this extent.

Whenever I mention Weta Digital in relation to a film I'm reviewing, it always involves me gushing like a broken faucet over how good their work is. So it comes as a surprise, to me at least, that this might serve as the single best showcasing of their work to date. I actively had to keep reminding myself that the apes we are seeing are rendered in CGI because the texture quality here is astoundingly real and tangible. With how much computer graphics are used to create the worlds depicted in film and elsewhere, the feeling that what is on screen isn’t actually there is a common problem. Very rarely are filmmakers able to use that technology to the effect of being as close to reality as it is possible to get, and even though there are a couple of shots where the use of computers is rather obvious, that’s precisely what we get here.
 
That sense of realism is aided by the motion-capture work of the cast, who basically communicate just about everything they need to with barely any dialogue. Sure, Caesar gets a few speeches to deliver (and Serkis does so incredibly well), but most of the character progression we get is through gesture and subtitling. With how language get played around with by the cast as a whole, whom all have differing capabilities in terms of communicating with others, this approach ends up doing magical things for the overall production. To be fair, quite a bit of the real emotional connection that this approach brings is aided by Michael Giacchino’s compositions, which hit at just the right moments to make the already extremely heavy scenes bring serious tears to the audiences’ eyes.

Despite their shared titles, the previous two Apes movies were told through the perspective of the humans. Rise was about Will’s initial experiments that led to the Simian flu pandemic, with his connection to Caesar being given prominence; Dawn, likewise, was Malcolm’s story of trying to connect with Caesar’s tribe and prevent war from breaking. This time around, it is almost exclusively Caesar’s story and there’s quite a story to be told here. Over the seventeen in-universe years that Caesar has been alive, he has suffered at the hands of humans… and yet, he still clings onto some hope that his tribe and the surviving humans could co-exist.
 
However, once the conflict becomes all too personal for him, even that goal seems to fall away from him. He’s driven to the point that Koba did back with Dawn in how human treatment has turned him into a vengeful creature, something brought home by how Koba’s own words come back to haunt him in a couple of harrowing moments. Even for a trilogy that contains quite a few moral complexities, seeing Caesar fear of what he is turning into might be one of the more layered characterizations I’ve seen yet this year, and will likely ever see this year. Just as the Colonel’s role in the main conflict is set but still allows for genuine (for lack of a better term) humanity, Caesar’s internal conflict between his want for his tribe to survive and his thirst for revenge for what was done to him shows a sense of reality that not many films these days, not even those outside of the SF umbrella, have been able to touch.

This series so far has always been riddled with numerous thematic elements: Oppression of minorities, the hubris of humanity, the best of intentions leading to the worst of outcomes, and that’s just for starters. The big theme of these films though, something brought right into the foreground in this installment, is humanity’s connection to nature. Nature, to put it simply, kind of gipped us as humans. We don’t have genetic defences that are designed against environmental aggressors (at least not to the extent of being literal poison so that nothing will try and eat us), no wings, no extra appendages; all we have is our creativity. With that, humanity shaped the world to better suit it, often by warping the natural order in ways that have unseen and wide-reaching consequences. While this series can be rather on-the-nose with its messages, and this film unfortunately isn’t an exception to that, the way nature plays into the actions of the humans in the story makes for rather fascinating ideas.
 
Well, fascinating might not be the correct word; terrifying might be more apt. After we see why the Colonel is waging the war that he is, injecting some religious zealotry and possibly even some contemporary political commentary into the already-viscous mixture, we see that humanity’s actions against nature have gone too far and are somehow going even further. The last remnants of humanity, represented by both the Colonel’s Alpha-Omega squadron as well as another army force that turns up during the climax, are so scared of their own annihilation that they are even willing to destroy each other in a vain hope to prevent it from happening. If humanity has reached the point where it doesn’t even view its own life as worth preserving (something echoed through Caesar’s bubbling prejudices), then quite frankly, humanity doesn’t deserve to survive. Then again, the title clearly states that this is a War For The Planet Of The Apes, not ‘Of’; this planet isn’t ours anymore, nor should it be if this is what we’re reduced to.

All in all, this is a heart-rending and incredibly fitting end to a trilogy of great films. The acting is fantastic, even if not all of the characters we see are entirely necessary, the effects work is among the best I have ever seen (this ranks up there alongside T2: Judgment Day in terms of the heights that CGI can reach on film, far as I’m concerned) and the writing furthers the nigh-on-Shakespearean touches from Dawn to deliver statements on human nature that are terrifying but also frankly honest.

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