War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

IMDB Rating : 8.2/10 (as on 17.07.17)

PG-13 | 2h 20min | Action, Adventure, Drama

After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind.

Director: Matt Reeves

Writers: Mark Bomback, Matt Reeves

Stars: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn

 IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★✬☆  

 The best Western of 2017

Michael Phillips

Gripping, visually assured and working far above its summer-sequel paygrade, "War for the Planet of the Apes" treats a harsh storyline with a solemnity designed to hoist the tale of Caesar, simian revolutionary — the Moses of apes — into the realm of the biblical.

Not everything in director and co-screenwriter Matt Reeves' movie works. Some of its grimmest passages, depicting life under concentration camp quarantine amid various, escalating acts of human-on-simian brutality, whack out the story's tonal balance. As the chief human antagonist, Woody Harrelson portrays an obsessive Special Forces colonel in a way treading a very fine line between "reliable" and "predictable."

Better to get these caveats out of the way, because there's an awful lot right with this film. Other franchises make more money, if only by overstaying their welcome, like a run-on sentence desperately seeking a period. But the "Planet of the Apes" prequels, begun in 2011 with "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" and followed in 2014 by "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," are crafty enough, both digitally and emotionally, to make you root for homo sapien extinction. I wouldn't blame you if you do. There are days in our real world when handing it all over to revolutionaries with hearts, brains and nerve seems like a pretty good bet.

At the end of "Rise," mighty Caesar provoked the wrath of the surviving humans (those who avoided the fatal simian flu). He knows he's in for a lifetime of miserable armed conflict. This means "War," which finds the ape tribe camped out along the land formerly known as the California/Oregon border. Human soldiers under the command of Harrelson's Col. McCullough wage an attack, and when Caesar and McCullough lock eyes after the colonel murders Caesar's wife, their mutually entwined fates are set.

The colonel's motto is simple: "We must abandon our humanity to save humanity." If that isn't bomb-the-village-in-order-to-save-it or "Apocalypse Now" enough for you, "War" goes whole hog with the "Apocalypse Now" riffs, from Harrelson's Kurtzian (or Brando-esque) bald head to a shot of scrawled graffiti in an underground tunnel: "Ape-pocalypse Now."

Let's talk about the motion-capture technology. In the "Planet of the Apes" universe, the mo-cap is so terrifically persuasive by now, so subtly detailed in every windblown close-up of fur, waving like wheat, "War" allows you to simply believe from the first scene. Serkis' Caesar is the opposite of a stunt; it's a real performance. He suffers perpetually in this outing yet never becomes a tiresome martyr. The ringer is Steve Zahn, whose vocal intonations and squirrely comic timing as Bad Ape (who rocks a cold-weather Timberland vest) cannot be praised highly enough. The movie may sag in its dour midsection — 15 of its 140 minutes could've, should've come out of that middle third —  but once the "Great Escape" part of the narrative kicks in, it's gratifying action indeed.

Don't bring young kids. The "Apes" mythology, a mainstay of American movies for 49 years now, always had a sadistic or at least a masochistic streak. (I saw the unaccountably G-rated "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" in 1971 at a Loop theater, when I was 10, and I've associated Chicago with emotional trauma ever since.) It's easy to get an audience on the apes' side if you make life and death difficult enough for the rooting-interest characters. It's harder to develop a satisfying succession of events, and complications, en route to the nomadic tribe's promised land that lies at the end of the trail. Reeves has done so. And composer Michael Giacchino's musical score, one of his very best, clicks right from the beginning, with a wittily reorchestrated rendition of the familiar 20th Century Fox theme song. The sound evokes something familiar but something new, too. At its best, so does the movie.

Read full review at Chicago Tribune

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

 Smart simian showdown

Simran Hans

Humans get sick, apes get smart, humans kill apes.” This is how Steve Zahn’s Bad Ape summarises the previous Planet of the Apes reboots. In the third of the Apes prequels (and director Matt Reeves’s second film in the series), the apes are out for revenge, led by a grizzled Caesar (Andy Serkis), whose driving “hate” is stoked by the death of his son at the hands of violent humans.

The film’s real technological achievement isn’t the rendering of CGI forests (though these are pretty good) but the motion-capture apes themselves, huge liquid eyes (“My God! Almost human!” the Colonel shudders) and facial expressions as thrillingly elastic and legible as the human actors who play them. All science fiction is philosophy; here, Reeves asks what distinguishes humans from animals. The twist is that as the apes get “smarter” (and the humans become crueller), they also grow softer, in a reminder that humanity resides in both the head and the heart.

 Read full review at The Guardian

 A Rare Beast Indeed

Dani Di Placido

War of the Planet of the Apes is not a fun popcorn flick. At no point during the film did I feel comfortable. As soon as the first shot was fired, I was on the edge of my seat, and there, I remained. The ceaseless struggle of these creatures, their bitter, pointless conflict with humanity, felt depressingly real. 

As much as I liked the first two installments of the Planet of the Apes reboot, there was always something a bit awkward about them. But despite their clunky titles and forced references to the original series, both were better than they had any right to be. But War is that exceedingly rare beast, a threequel that is far and away the best of a good trilogy.

It helps that motion-capture technology has come a long, long way. We’re now at the point where an actor can stand next to a CGI gorilla and be completely outshined by the gorilla’s performance. These apes look extraordinarily lifelike, no matter what the situation; bloodied, bruised, drenched in water or covered in warpaint, it doesn’t matter. Andy Serkis’s performance transcends special effects; Caesar has evolved from a cinematic spectacle into a convincing character.

Remember, Serkis has worked his way through this trilogy while wearing a ridiculous, blue, babble-covered wetsuit, and, somehow, managed to convincingly portray an animal with a human soul.

And Woody Harrelson’s performance, a colonel who has lost his humanity trying to protect his people, is equally striking. Harrelson performs cruel acts regularly, but never joyfully. He is haunted by his past actions, and both he and Caesar constantly appear to be on the verge of tears. His character is a dark reflection of Caesar's; he represents what the noble ape could become if he allows his hate to consume him. 

This was marketed as a war movie, but really, it’s a story about surviving the horror of war rather than triumphing in glorious battle. The apes are victims; attacked, brutalized, and enslaved by soldiers so vicious they make you loathe your own species.

Each member of Caesar’s posse of apes boasts a surprisingly strong personality, despite the fact that the vast majority of their communication is nonverbal. They may be hulking beasts, but they never feel safe, not for a moment. The enemy is always out there, and humankind’s unremitting violence toward the apes serves as a perfect metaphor for our current assault on nature.

The apes are perceived as an “other,” dehumanized because of their species, despite their obvious intelligence. In fact, it is their intelligence that appears to frighten humanity the most. The idea that they may one day overwhelm mankind is what drives the desperation of the soldiers. When we arrive at an internment camp where the apes are forced to “build a wall,” the situation begins to feel increasingly familiar. An American flag hangs prominently in the camp, and eventually bursts into flames.

There’s some very on-the-nose symbolism here; Caesar is quite literally hung on a cross, more than once, and one of the characters asks “what would Caesar do?” Another character states, with a straight face, “I sacrificed my only son to save humanity.”

But as far as Jesus archetypes go, Caesar makes a pretty good monkey messiah. His story is one of perpetual suffering, and his merciful nature doesn’t do him much good at all. But he serves as an inspiration to the rest of his species, and that’s what counts.

War for the Planet of the Apes is an explosive and emotional end to the Apes trilogy, and perhaps serves as the beginning of a new one. It’s amusing how far this series is removed from the corny source material; in retrospect, the entire trilogy serves as a shining example of how to do a reboot right. Take the original concept, and expand upon it. Tell a story that reflects the current state of the world, instead of just retelling the tale with a shinier coat of paint.

I’m already anticipating the next installment, if there is one. And more than anything, I’m excited to what kind of creature Andy Serkis brings to life next.

 Read full review at Forbes

Movie Rating ★★★★☆ 

A soulful, mesmerising spectacle worthy of David Lean

Robbie Collin

Six years on from the reboot, life isn’t getting any easier on the Planet of the Apes. Following Rise of (2011) and Dawn of (2014), the series has now moved directly to War for, which is a galling development for those of us who’d dared to hope for Breakfast at.

Nevertheless, the smartest decision this unflaggingly smart summer franchise ever made was keeping each of its increasingly sober instalments ape-centric. Whenever crunch time arrives, the films throw in their lot with the simians, which casts humankind as the enemy and gives these classic frontier stories a thrillingly disarming and destabilising edge.

This trick is pulled earlier and more effectively than ever in returning director Matt Reeves’ icily engrossing new chapter, which modulates between revenge western and historical epic via Vietnam meltdown movie. In one scene, the words ‘Ape-pocalypse Now’ are actually scrawled on a tunnel wall, just in case the parallels weren’t already conspicuous enough.

As before, the apes’ leader is the chimpanzee Caesar (Andy Serkis) – and an early confrontation with McCullough at the animals’ waterfall hideaway sets up a blood debt that must be ferociously repaid. Along with a small team of trusted allies, including his orangutan advisor Maurice (Karin Konoval), Caesar abandons his tribe and makes for McCullough’s base somewhere in the frozen wilderness, where countless primate prisoners of war are waiting for their Moses.

Having been in the game since Gollum, Serkis is something of a performance-capture pioneer – and is on exceptional form here, at the head of a brilliant cast that also includes the movement coach Terry Notary, whose uncanny ape-acting can be seen sans CGI in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning The Square.

But where in Serkis’s previous roles there was always a sense you were watching a clever special effect, the digital characters here – created in tandem with the ape actors by the effects house Weta Digital – hit whatever brain-lulling degree of subtlety and detail is required to make the effect itself just melt away from sight. All that’s left are the actors’ performances – except somehow they’re being given by orangutans and chimps.

For five minutes it’s the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen. After that, in the best imaginable way, you stop noticing. Sixteen years after The Fellowship of the Ring, the uncanny valley has flattened into the desert of the real.

Reeves, presumably well aware that a significant technological threshold has been crossed here, regularly brings in his camera close to his simian leads and gazes into their eyes in mesmerising close-up. In one extraordinary sequence, the orangutan Maurice befriends a mute young girl (Amiah Miller) who becomes the apes’ travelling companion at an otherwise abandoned coastal homestead.

The bond between the two characters is established wordlessly, with simple shots of faces: razor-edge advances bringing a strange new power to one of cinema’s most foundational techniques.

It matters because for the film to click, we have to invest in its ape characters as immediately and intuitively as we would people. (For one thing, there aren’t many of the latter around: other than the little girl, the only notable human is played by Harrelson, and he’s a psychopath.) The soulful stares are a vital part of this, but so is convincing comic timing, particularly when it comes to the chimp played by Steve Zahn, a bumbling PG Tips-type whose unhappy past has left him answering to the name ‘Bad Ape’.

These skits never quite relax into themselves, however: War for the Planet of the Apes doesn’t really deviate from the solemn tone it strikes early on, and even its notionally funny moments are as earnest as the religious and wartime epics to which it regularly turns for visual inspiration.

The horizon-stretching wide shots of Caesar and his comrades traversing openly evoke David Lean – one of the few directors who could make the screen feel big enough to do history justice. Reeves marshals more than his fair share of battle scenes and sweeping set-pieces, but never forgets the flicker of a face can provide all the spectacle that cinema requires.

Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

A sincere attempt which never soars to the level of a war

Shalini Langer

The war has been building up in this reboot franchise, and to one inexorable end. In this third — and clearly by far the last — film, there are no greys and blacks anymore. There is one and only one beast, and it isn’t the one living in the jungle.

First, director Rupert Wyatt, and then Reeves, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, had a great run getting us here. Especially the second film where this battle, like all great battles, had morality and venality, pathos and valour, and above all regrets. War for the Planet of the Apes is a solemn, sincere attempt, but it never soars to the level of a war, never happens on the stage of a planet, and never gets us rooting for the largely hapless apes. It is an impressive film, technologically astounding, and it is a hardworking film, with the camera striving to capture every puff of the nostril of its apes (motion-capture performance at its finest). But that doesn’t necessarily make it a particularly great film.

We left the story last time with the humans and apes ranged against each other. The attempts of the leader of the apes, Caesar (Serkis), to appeal to the good sense of all have failed. Caesar was a hero in the grandest tradition in Dawn…, honourable, brave and tragic. War… begins with the apes forced deep into the woods and being hunted down by the humans, led by a Colonel whose reputation precedes him, literally. We hear just his voice at first, egging his men on to find the legendary Caesar.

In the film’s most menacing scene, the Colonel (Harrelson), soon himself descends during the course of a night, and kills Caesar’s family. Caesar, who has so far strived to put emotions like revenge and anger at bay, now makes it a personal battle with Colonel, putting the lives of the apes at risk.

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So far, we can keep in step with the many allegories Reeves is tossing around here, including the wars humans wage on people they dub “beasts”, the hunt through dense, confusing forests for an undefined “enemy”, and who is to be called a “savage”. While some of those comparisons flowed naturally in Dawn…, Reeves literally spells them out here. Even revenge is an emotion one understands.

However, as the film goes on, it just keeps adding more references, to no apparent avail. The Colonel is a shaven-head, half-mad, rogue autonomous authority functioning in the middle of the jungle (yes, Apocalypse Now). He keeps the apes in concentration camp-like conditions, talks about having sacrificed his son, about killing many men for fear of a plague, and of having achieved purity in the process (Bible, Hitler, the list goes on). In case we don’t get it, a sign in one of the tunnels spells it out, ‘Ape-Pocalypse Now’. The apes are branded with A as well as the alpha sign — these are everywhere — as well as the word donkey. The humans also refer to them, always, as ‘Donkey’. Why not just monkey?

No one asks that question. Meanwhile, Casear’s gang, including the wise Maurice (Konoval), picks up an orphaned, mute girl (Miller) and a scared ‘zoo ape’ (Zahn), as it tries to find the Colonel. They are the only two people who stand out from the crowd in the film, without adding anything to the story in any comprehensive manner.

The War… also doesn’t build up to any grand climax. Just when there seems the possibility of one, it opts for an end that can’t even revel in its own doom as, surely, there is more ahead.

Read full review at Indian Express

An Epic Slog

DAVID SIMS  

It is necessary to note, from the start, that War for the Planet of the Apes is perhaps misleadingly titled. The third film in this retelling of one of Hollywood’s strangest franchises is not about a grand battle between man and super-ape, a showdown that began brewing in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and exploded into all-out conflict in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Instead, the writer and director Matt Reeves (returning after his sterling work with Dawn) has created a pseudo-Biblical epic shot through with apocalyptic fervor, a tale of the old world order dying out and being replaced with something different. Perhaps Exodus of the Apes would have suited better.

The “war,” after all, was lost by humans long ago, when the “simian flu” (the same super-virus that enhanced the apes’ intelligence) wiped out most of the planet’s population at the end of Rise. Reeves’s vision of the aftermath, in Dawn, was so surprising and effective because of how verdant the world looked—with human influence receding, nature became overgrown and lush, and forests reclaimed all of the pitiful manmade infrastructure. But War, set two years after Dawn, has a disheartening sameness to it and none of the visual jolt of Reeves’s last film.

War for the Planet of the Apes is long—at 140 minutes, easily the longest Apes film ever—and meditative, stripping away relatable human characters to focus entirely on the hero Caesar (Andy Serkis, the king of motion-capture performance), the chimpanzee who leads a colony of apes in California’s redwood forests. That Reeves is presenting a big-budget summer blockbuster centered on CGI simians who largely communicate in sign language is still one of the most flabbergasting triumphs of the current blockbuster age; even more impressive is how naturally Caesar and his compatriots come across. As with Dawn, I never found myself yearning for the story to cut to flesh-and-blood actors. In fact, anytime it did, I found my mind wandering.

In War, though, Reeves doesn’t do enough to build on the major achievements of Dawn. That film was a parable of the toxicity of humanity and the corrupting power of guns—its main conflict broke out when the villainous, vengeful ape Koba (Toby Kebbell) found a cache of weapons. In War, the carnage is taken for granted and Caesar’s conflict is internal, as he wrestles with his own desire for payback (represented by taunting nightmares he has of Koba) versus the necessity of leading his colony to a newer, safer place far away from human threats.

Dawn gave more of an emotional grounding to the rift between Caesar (who had largely been treated kindly by human scientists in Rise) and Koba (who was essentially tortured into existence). In War, what remains of humanity is basically a plague waiting to be finally scrubbed away—a notion that doesn’t really make for good drama. The most compelling dynamic comes with the evolved apes who work for the Colonel, who are referred to as “donkeys” and exist as second-class citizens within his miserable militia.

The strangest thing about Caesar’s heroism is that War continues to pay lip service to the Apes films of the ’60s and ’70s, placing itself in a kind of continuity with them. War introduces the idea that some humans, perhaps as a result of the simian flu, have lost the ability to speak, presaging the “primitive” humans present in Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 Planet of the Apes. One could still feasibly imagine a fourth film in this series where a human astronaut crash-lands on the planet and is horrified by what he finds—and yet the apes of Reeves’s film are far less tyrannical than the ones Charlton Heston met so long ago. Is Reeves looking to rewrite the history of the series he’s rebooted? Or is he tossing in these references to films past to suggest that harder times could lie ahead for Caesar’s society?

A little more ambiguity around those questions would go a long way, and would help justify what a miserable schlep War for the Planet of the Apes becomes: In Dawn, the story’s darkness made more sense because there were heroes and villains on both sides of the human-ape divide; in War, we’re just watching the final death throes of our own species. The technical craft of the film is as remarkable as its predecessor, down to the motion-capture effects that register every one of Serkis’s facial tics. But Reeves’s story ends up echoing a very old one—essentially, Moses leading his people out of bondage and into freedom—without weaving in any nuance. War for the Planet of the Apes is an epic, to be sure—but an epic slog.

 Read full review at The Atlantic

An Adventure Humans Almost Don't Deserve

Stephanie Zacharek

The bigger movies get, somehow the smaller we get. Increasingly elaborate special effects, marathon-length runtimes, plots that sprawl off the rails within the first 20 minutes: Pictures built to entertain us don’t necessarily make us feel more human. But Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes is something else, a summer blockbuster that treats its audience as primates of a higher order. It’s not going to change the summer-blockbuster landscape single-handedly, but at least it comes by its thrills honestly: This is a spectacle that trusts us to think.

In the first movie in the rebooted franchise, the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (directed by Rupert Wyatt), a bunch of superbright chimps—the virus that has made them so smart is lethal to humans—break out of a Northern California research facility and scamper over the Golden Gate Bridge to freedom in the redwood forest. In the Reeves-directed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), set some 10 years later, the apes have built a world of their own, but it’s threatened by the relatively few surviving humans—tensions escalate into an all-out war between ape and man. The anchor character of those two movies, and of this one, is the chimp Caesar, played, via motion-capture technology, by Andy Serkis. His simian brow is noble. His eyes carry both shadows of sorrow and flickers of hope. He’s a leader of apes, and men could learn a thing or two from him too. But in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a hate-filled bonobo named Koba (Toby Kebbell) instigated a war Caesar was unable to stop.

There’s ape betrayal, ape bravery, ape joy and lots of ape action in War for the Planet of the Apes. Yet the picture’s plot mechanics aren’t nearly as significant or as memorable as its characters are: The way they move and interact invites curiosity and sometimes even wonder. The apes who have had contact with humankind speak English, but most communicate via sign and body language—their interactions constitute a ballet of interpretive dance and knowing looks. In addition to Caesar, many old favorites from the other movies return, the loveliest among them the empathetic orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval): His gentle soul shines through his luminous pie plate of a face. He’s a calming influence on Caesar and a watchful maternal stand-in for the mute, though never excessively cute, orphan girl who’s adopted by the apes (Amiah Miller). Best of all, though, is the chimp played by Steve Zahn, an old-man loner who goes by a name some humans gave him long ago: Bad Ape. Bad Ape is actually a great ape, a marvelous, semi-forgetful senior citizen whose doddering generosity is the sort that can save the day. (When he holds a pair of binoculars to his eyes the wrong way around, the “oooooohhhh” of disappointment that escapes his lips is one of the movie’s goofiest little pleasures.)War for the Planet of the Apes is hardly all joy and light: Harrelson’s loose-cannon Colonel is a sadist and a dictator wannabe, and the movie contains some harrowing scenes of ape suffering. Be forewarned if you’re thinking of taking really little kids. But there’s plenty of vital poetry in the picture, particularly of the visual sort: The sight of apes sitting upright on horseback, riding off to battle or just trotting along a beach, is strangely stirring, a picture of animal dignity that isn’t quite right yet makes all kinds of sense. The special traits of these creatures—their eagerness to do the right thing and their impulse to look out for one another—are qualities to which real humans should aspire. In the words of Bad Ape, a kind of broken English-as-a-second-language that nevertheless gets the message across: “New friends. Special day.”

 Read full review at Time

 

New ‘Planet of the Apes’ Makes You Root Against Your Species

A. O. SCOTT

There is a scene toward the end of “War for the Planet of the Apes” that is as vivid and haunting as anything I’ve seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in ages, a moment of rousing and dreadful cinematic clarity that I don’t expect to shake off any time soon. I’ll tread lightly, but I don’t think anything I say here can spoil its power.

Two groups of humans have just battled, and the victors, having slaughtered the enemy, burst into raucous cheers. It’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in movies dozens of times before: the cheapening of mass death into an easy win for the good guys. Except that in this case we, the humans in the theater seats, are not the only ones watching. A crowd of apes is also present, an emerging society whose national epic this film and its companions have marvelously and improbably become. The apes pause to witness the aftermath of the carnage they have narrowly escaped, and their wordless, shocked response, registered above all on the face of Caesar, their leader, is an eloquent rebuke to a species that has abandoned any but a biological claim to the name human.

Recall that “ape not kill ape” is the political and moral foundation of ape civilization, handed down by Caesar, their Moses, though he hasn’t always obeyed this commandment. The spectacle of people’s rejoicing in the destruction of their own kind is upsetting, and as the audience absorbs the apes’ shock, we become aware of another, deeper unease. We are now, three movies into this reborn franchise, entirely on the side of the apes. The prospect of our own extinction, far from horrifying, comes as a relief. At last the poor planet will catch a break.

If you saw “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” — the second chapter in the series so far, bridging “Rise” and “War” — you may recall that poor, abused laboratory chimp’s evolution from victim to nemesis. The damage Koba had suffered at the hands of humans made him intolerant and fanatical, an embodiment of political extremism who needed to be checked, and ultimately destroyed, by Caesar, whose political temperament tended toward moderation and compromise. Their conflict was mirrored by a struggle on the human side between a genocidal, ape-hating military commander and a rival leader who believed in coexistence.

 “Dawn,” like “Rise” before it, rested on a hopeful, slightly hokey message of interspecies harmony. In spite of their differences and mutual suspicions, maybe the two primate societies, one coalescing while the other slid toward chaos, could share the Earth, or at least the stretch of Northern California forest where this franchise plants its allegorical flag.

Times change. “War for the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Matt Reeves, is the grimmest episode so far, and also the strongest, a superb example — rare in this era of sloppily constructed, commercially hedged cinematic universes — of clear thinking wedded to inventive technique in popular filmmaking. The distinction of this run of “Planet of the Apes” movies has been its commitment to the venerable belief that science fiction belongs to the literature of ideas, and its willingness to risk seeming to take itself too seriously. Each episode has pursued a stark ethical or political problem, and each has shifted the moral ground from human to ape.

“Rise” was about how people treat and mistreat animals, about the tension between recognizing them as sentient beings and the long habit of exploiting and confining them. “Dawn” was a wishful parable of decolonization and counterinsurgency, concerned with the competing but equally legitimate claims of two tribes occupying adjacent territory. “War” — which, in spite of its title, is less a war film than a western wrapped around a prison movie — vindicates Koba’s view of humanity as irredeemably cruel and deceitful.

The memory of Koba’s own treachery is kept alive, as some of his followers have drifted from militant anti-Caesarism to collaboration with the enemy species. There is a new nemesis in town, a renegade colonel played by Woody Harrelson, who goes full Heart of Darkness, staging a one-man remake of “Apocalypse Now” in a medical base he has refashioned into a concentration camp. He has Marlon Brando’s clean-shaven dome, Robert Duvall’s mirrored sunglasses and Dennis Hopper’s manic verbosity. The horror! The horror!

Really, though, it’s a lot of fun, in spite of the somber picture I’ve been painting. Mr. Reeves, who also directed “Dawn,” has a dark vision, but also a light touch when necessary, and, above all, a commitment to creating a world that is coherent as well as fantastical. This world is also intensely and somewhat unimaginatively masculine. The default setting for primate social organization in these movies, human and otherwise, is patriarchal, and while a few female apes and a young human girl appear on screen, the filmmakers’ inability to flesh out the familial and affective dimensions of an otherwise richly rendered reality is frustrating.

But still, the motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces, often seen in close-up. Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting, and it’s complemented by those of Karin Konoval, reprising her role as the wise orangutan Maurice, and Steve Zahn, as a sad-clown sidekick named Bad Ape.

Caesar and Maurice communicate in primitive English and sign language, and for long stretches their adventures unfold without much human interaction, though they do adopt a mute human orphan (Amiah Miller) shortly before they meet Bad Ape. Our ilk is in a bad way, and not only because of the fanatical, desperate militarism represented by the Colonel. A new strain of virus is robbing people of their ability to speak, accelerating a reversal of species hierarchy set in motion two movies ago when Caesar first howled the word “no.”

He is a grayer, sadder hero now, and in “War” he succumbs for a while to a vengeful impulse at odds with his essential high-mindedness. You could say that he is putting his humanity at risk, or that he’s only human, after all, but of course both descriptions would be absurd. We’ll have to come up with a new vocabulary, but while we still have this one — and while flesh-and-blood people are still directing digital gorillas and chimps — I’ll just say that it’s good to see a movie so thoroughly humane.

 Read full review at New York Times