While watching War for the Planet of the Apes I found myself wondering: When did Woody Harrelson become one of our most interesting working actors? I mean, even from his early days on Cheers it was obvious that he was talented, but recently he has become one of those actors whose movies I will seek out, even if I’m not particularly interested in the film itself, because I know that he is going to turn in a stunning performance. It’s usually worth the price of admission just to see what he is going to bring to a character, how he is going to inhabit it.
It’s this particular quality that turns what could very easily be a one-note villain – Harrelson’s “The Colonel” into a much deeper character – one defined not just by his obsessions, but by his sense of justice and history, and a fear for the future of humanity itself.
Of course, much of the credit for this must go to the writers, Mark Bomback and Matt Reeves – who also directed – but in the end it is Harrelson’s performance that makes the character a living person.
Nor is Harrelson’s the only outstanding presence in the film, but when it comes to the characters of both Caesar and “Bad Ape” (the only name he is given) it is much harder to know exactly where the credit should lie. There can be no doubt that the contributions of Andy Serkis and Steve Zahn deserve an incredible amount of praise, but there is the question of just how much of the realization of these characters lie at the feet of the actors and how much credit must go to the post production team that overlaid the actors; bodies and faces to turn them into fully fleshed out apes.
(By the way, I didn’t mention him above, but special recognition must also go to Karin Konoval and his ape avatar Maurice who proves to be the heart of the renegade apes.)
Picking up two years after the en of the previous film, War follows the seemingly inevitable conflict between the now-growing-ever-smarter apes and a humankind which finds its back against a wall due not only to the threat provided by the animals but from a mutated form of the simian virus seem in awn which now seems to be robbing people not only of their speech but of their higher reasoning abilities.
Though one has to presume that this conflict is being played out on a world-wide scale, the film itself focuses on one conflict, that between Caesar and his ragtag band of renegades an The Colonel, who is a renegade himself, being in a war not only with the creatures he sees as the doom of mankind but also with his superiors and other human soldiers who he sees as short sighted and unable to understand the repercussions of what is occurring.
I’m not going to go a lot into the plot or specific occurrences here, because in many ways what plays out is inevitable, knowing what we do going in. After all, the series is called “Planet of the Apes”, not “Planet of the Humans Who Retook Their World After a Short Conflict with Apes”. Fortunately, this is one of those cases where it truly is all about the journey instead of the destination.
Matt Reeves has stated that after he and Bomback finished Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, they watched a lot of movies looking for inspiration for where to go with the series.
One of the first things that Mark and I did because we had just finished Dawn was that we decided to watch a million movies. We decided to do what people fantasize what Hollywood screenwriters get to do but no one actually does. We got Fox to give us a theater and we watched movie after movie. We watched every Planet of the Apes movie, war movies, westerns, Empire Strikes Back… We just thought, ‘We have to pretend we have all the time in the world,’ even though we had limited time. We got really inspired.
Those inspirations show through in the execution of the film which makes no effort to hide its influences. There are the obvious ones like Apocalypse Now! and the story of Moses (made extremely explicit at the en of the movie) but even less obvious ones like Bridge on the River Kwai and The Outlaw Josie Wales.
War has been said to be the last of the Apes movies for now, and if that’s true, it does provide a satisfying conclusion, fulfilling its remit of getting everything in place and one can see after the passage of years this becoming the world on which Charlton Heston crash lands.
Still, there is always the question of where the series goes next.It’s entirely possible that we could be in for another remake of the original, but let’s hope not. That’s one well that’s already been returned to too many times, and unless someone can come up with a truly innovative take on it, should be left alone. Of course, as noted above, there is plenty of open time left between the end of this film and where things stand at the beginning of the 1968 film, so there are quite a few potential stories to be told there.
One thing I think we can be sure of, though, is that as long as audiences continue to make these movie profitable, there’s no way this will be our last visit to the Planet of the Apes.
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