Rating of
2/4
"War For The Planet Of The Apes"
Yojimbo - wrote on 08/15/19
As the war against the humans continues, Caesar abandons his people to pursue a vendetta against the renegade commander who executed his wife and son.
The third in the series of reboots of the classic dystopian sci-fi, War follows the example of the second instalment which preferred action and spectacle to the more high-minded themes that marked out the original film. Technically the film is similarly impressive, with CGI characters that feel like real protagonists bolstered by Andy Serkis' singular talent in this department and thanks to nice cinematography and production design it is always attractive to look at. But with the intelligent themes of man's treatment of the natural world and the nature of what it is to be "human" completely stripped away, it fails to engage on any intellectual level. In fact the story is far more interested in contriving implausible continuity with the original 1968 film and every plot development feels episodic and generally unconvincing. The presence of copious dollops of syrup alongside a comic sidekick also gives it a rather "Disneyfied" quality to the point where the climactic scenes set within a simian concentration camp feel more like a monkey-based version of Chicken Run than anything else. At two hours and twenty minutes it is rather long as well and although it never felt boring, I liked the film less and less as time went on.
War is not completely without merit, but it's easily the weakest of the three films and must surely be the end point of a franchise that is seemingly bereft of ideas.
