SUCCESSFUL EVOLUTION
Latest Planet of the Apes gets it right
Does anyone remember how bad The Planet of the Apes once got? After the mind-bending
1968 original — Charlton Heston yelling “You blew it up!” — came a horrid sequel (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) that had fans saying the same thing.
Then, the not-as-bad Escape from the Planet of the Apes, where intelligent chimpanzees came to our world. But it all got progressively sillier, culminating in a short-lived TV series that was eventually edited into Saturday-afternoon movies with names like Life, Liberty and Pursuit on the Planet of the Apes. It was as if the series had taken to throwing feces at the audience.
War for the Planet of the Apes, third in a rebooted storyline that began in 2011, follows a more satisfying, Darwinian course. Each new film in this series is as good as, if not better than, its predecessor. They adapt. They evolve. I’ll even forgive the poo-flinging joke in this one, given that it’s perfectly timed, well aimed and pretty darn funny.
War picks up not long after the events of the previous film, which saw battles between humans and apes but, notably, treachery and altruism from all the species involved. We already know humans can be both kind and cruel. Why wouldn’t our closest cousins be similarly split?
As this one opens, a human army, led by a bald Woody Harrelson — something telling in the way a man fighting apes chooses to go hairless into battle — has closed in on the main ape encampment. The apes’ leader is Caesar, once again played by Andy Serkis in a motion-capture suit that has pundits and purists arguing over whether such digital acting could ever qualify for an Oscar. It’s definitely a prized performance.
When members of Caesar’s family are killed, the ape vows revenge, and the story, by returning scribe Mark Bomback and director Matt Reeves, quickly slides into the rhythm of a classic western, with a posse of apes on horseback tracking their outlaw quarry, with a score to match.
But the film refuses to stay within the confines of a single genre. While technically science fiction, there are sections of the story that feel like a Second World War tale, with primate POWs surrounded by watch towers. Or a Vietnam conflict drama, the human combatants wearing jungle combat helmets with MONKEY KILLER or BEDTIME FOR BONZO scrawled on the back, and referring to the enemy as “Kong.” There’s even a disaster-movie trope that swoops in near the end.
But for all the shifts in tone, Reeves juggles pitch and pace to keep the film feeling like one continuous, coherent story. And as in earlier Apes movies (and unlike, say, the recent Transformers bombast), the fighting stays on a deliberately human (or apish) scale, never drowning out the emotional beats. A perfect example comes near the end of the film, when a flaming helicopter crashes almost unnoticed in the background. Why? Because there are more important things going on between simians in the foreground.
The series is also notable for its revolving cast. Part 1 (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2011) gives us James Franco as the geneticist who inadvertently creates this topsy-turvy world, helped by a plague that wiped out most of humanity, and which took place BETWEEN movies. When was the last time an end-of-days story happened entirely off screen? Gary Oldman and Jason Clarke headed up the human cast in the second instalment (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 2014).
In addition to Harrelson’s turn as a snarling misapethropist — though like all the best villains, he has a coherent world view and a logic behind everything he does — War for the Planet of the Apes introduces two new characters of note. One is Steve Zahn in a motion-capture performance as a former zoo resident who calls himself Bad Ape. Eccentric and unpredictable, he might just be the best thing in this great movie.
The other newcomer is human, a little girl (Amiah Miller) whose character’s name will resonate with fans of the 1968 original. In fact, the filmmakers drop all sorts of visual and auditory clues into the story to suggest a kind of full circle with that movie.
There has been sporadic talk of continuing the Apes franchise, but to avoid a repetition of history, it might be best to stop it with this one. You don’t monkey around with perfection.