Emotional ending explained
SPOILER ALERT: Director and co-writer Matt Reeves says his decision about the film’s final moments was ‘natural and inevitable’
W
ARNING: Major spoilers about War for the Planet of
the Apes ahead. In the run-up to the release of War of the
Planet of the Apes, trailers and billboards promised an epic climax to the scifi-action series with the foreboding but cryptic tagline: “Witness the End.”
The end of what, though?
Some loyal fans of the franchise had an inklingof where things might be heading — and took to social media in advance of the movie’s release to express their fears.
“I swear to god if Caesar dies in Planet of the Apes tomorrow ima legit be in mourning,” one fan wrote on Twitter. “If/when Caesar dies in this new Apes movie, I will cry legitimate tears,” another fan posted.
Well, someone should probably check in on those folks to make sure they’re OK.
In any ongoing film franchise, the death of a central character is never a thing to be taken lightly, which is why it so rarely happens. But for Apes director and co-writer Matt Reeves, the decision to bring the story of the ape leader Caesar (Andy Serkis) to an end in the film’s emotional final moments did not involve any agonising or secondguessing. It simply felt natural and inevitable.
“The idea of reaching the end of the journey was there right from the beginning, to be honest with you,” Reeves told The Los
Angeles Times last month in an interview at his office on the 20th Century Fox lot. “There was an opportunity there to fulfil his character in a way that just having an ongoing Caesar story in another movie wouldn’t allow you to do.”
For Reeves, the ending of the new film offers a suitably mythic conclusion what he considers “the Caesar cycle” of three films — 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and
now War — that have charted the noble ape leader’s journey from infancy through both inner and outer conflict to a kind of final peace.
In Reeves’ mind, the character’s death was almost biblically preordained. “He was sort of this ape Moses, so for him not to be able to be in the Promised Land with them — I thought reaching this place could be tremendously emotional,” he said. Indeed, at its heart the
Apes franchise has always been more about empathy and feeling than about noise and spectacle. “One of the things I’ve found really gratifying in seeing people’s response to the movie is that they say is they never expected that these movies would be so emotional,” he said. “That’s the whole goal of what we’re doing: to try to create emotional identification with these characters.”
From a creative standpoint, Serkis completely understood the choice to bring Caesar’s story to an end. “It feels absolutely right, sad though I am,” said the actor, whose performance-capture work as Caesar has earned widespread acclaim. “It’s been an extraordinary journey playing a character all the way through his life, which is a rare thing for an actor to do. It’s been an amazing exploration.”
Given how that exploration unfolded, the fact that Caesar’s final exit was handled with a moment of quiet grace rather than, say, a blaze of bullets seemed particularly fitting to Serkis. “The underplaying of that — rather than going out in the classic trilogy-ending blockbuster battle move — I think that is really cool,” he said.