War for the Planet of the Apes (2. Two things first. One, War for the Planet of the Apes is an entirely excellent bit of popcorn drama, the first summer movie of 2.
Two things first. One, War for the Planet of the Apes is an entirely excellent bit of popcorn drama, the first summer movie of 2017 (an important, subtly different. A teaser for the final trailer for War for the Planet of the Apes features narration from original franchise star Charlton Heston. War for the Planet of the Apes - 2017 Full Movie Online Watch and Download Free HD instant free on your War for the Planet of the Apes Desktop, Laptop, notepad, smart. Cast, crew, reviews, plot summary, comments, and other movie information. I think has a fighting chance of still being passionately remembered 2. I am in no ways surprised by its quick fade at the box office. I'd be more surprised by the opposite, in fact. This is a suffocatingly dour motion picture, easily the most straight- up depressing big- budget studio tentpole since The Dark Knight, or at least The Dark Knight Rises.* Whether that is earned or not is, I think, a matter of individual taste, but it's a franchise that has thrived on downbeat, morbid storylines for a half- century now, so.. Two, I have called it . And moreover, I feel that if you took the first half of Dawn.. In the particular case of War.., the more obvious problems include an extremely logy pace - the 2- hour and 2. Planet of the Apes films to date, and the running time is palpable - and a script by Mark Bomback and director Matt Reeves that spends a little bit of time (oh, let's be fair, a lot of time) stuck in the mode where things that are extremely sad are held to be extremely serious and thus much more artistic. And just to make sure how artistic it is, it repeats things, both plot points and explicit declarations of theme, to make absolutely sure we get it. So not, alas, an instant- masterpiece nor any real challenge to the supremacy of the 1. Planet of the Apes as the series' best film, but on its own terms, and in the midst of the desert that has been the summer movie season in 2. Building on the setting and conflicts established over the course of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which depicted the dawn of the planet of the apes) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (which depicted the rise of the planet of the apes), War.. Learning that Reeves & Bomback's viewing list before they sat down to write this one included the likes of The Bridge on the River Kwai (based on a novel by Planet of the Apes creator Pierre Boulle), for that sort of psychological study hiding just beneath the surface of an action epic is very much where this new film wants to be. It's not as good as The Bridge on the River Kwai, obviously, nor even particularly close, but it's fucking impressive for a 2. CGI- dominated popcorn movie to be this much of a gravely sober- minded character drama as this, and the gamble certainly paid off: Caesar the hyper- intelligent chimpanzee (mo- capped and voiced by Andy Serkis) is an eminently worthy character, better even than he already was in the last two movies, when he was the best VFX protagonist ever. In fact, if there's one area where War for the Planet of the Apes excels beyond imagining, where it proves itself as a stone- cold masterpiece of cinema, it's in the extraordinary quality of its CGI cast. Caesar was great in Rise.., Caesar and Toby Kebbell's Koba (who gets a brief dream cameo here) were great in Dawn.., but War.. So the apes have to count for everything, and they do that with flying colors: Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval) and Rocket the chimpanzee (Terry Notary), neither of them new faces in this series, emerge with emotionally resonant personalities like never before - Maurice especially, with his probing, serious, concerned eyes - and the film trots out several new characters just as strong, including Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), a pitiable little torture victim whose confusion functions as the closest thing this bleak, bitter film has to comic relief (and effectively, I'd say; it's more sad than funny, which is all this film could bear, tonally), Lake (Sara Canning), in love with Caesar's son, who stands in for all of the apes who end up in prison midway through the film, and Donkey (Ty Olsson), a quisling gorilla serving the humans. Such is the effectiveness with which the film builds out these characters that when we see Lake for the first time after a while, I gasped a little bit at how bad she looked after her mistreatment - the CGI fucking chimpanzee achieved this thing. Anyway, the film's story includes elements of . It's in the last third of these that I think the film reaches its heights, both because Reeves and cinematographer Michael Seresin come up with some excellent ways to freshen up the standard military POW camp visual clich. The music throughout is great, Giacchino's best work since Up, but it's the nerve- stretching cues he writes for the prison break where it becomes a real masterpiece of popcorn film scoring, using relatively ascetic orchestrations to hit the audience emotionally while keeping the tension taut and sweaty through the relentless rhythm of his motifs. The result of all this - the grave, dour character study that threads through the whole film, and the increasing adventure movie tension that grows tighter and tighter throughout - is that War for the Planet of the Apes is an exhausting movie overall, though I think an exceedingly pleasurable one. It is about as anti- fun as something can get and still plausibly fall into the category of summertime popcorn movie; but once a year, this kind of ultra- serious pop- opera (which I mean literally; Giacchino climaxes the score with a passage that's not quite the finale of Das Rheingold, but it sure as hell makes you think about it) can be a nice corrective to the general fluffiness of the season, and in the enormously airheaded summer of 2. It's a suitable capstone to the best franchise of the 2. Planet of the Apes movie for a good long while, they certainly did a good job of ending it with a heaving, emotional stinger that feels earned both by this film itself, and by the two films preceding it. Not bad for something with both feet planted so firmly in the world of trashy pulp sci- fi. Not bad at all. Reviews in this series. Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1. Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Post, 1. Escape from the Planet of the Apes (Taylor, 1. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (Thompson, 1. Battle for the Planet of the Apes (Thompson, 1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Wyatt, 2. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2. War for the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2. It picks up after “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2. Caesar (Andy Serkis), the talking ape, and his quest for peace, family and freedom. This time he squares off against a ruthless warlord, referred to as “the Colonel” (Woody Harrelson), who wants both Caesar and all the apes killed to prevent the spread of a debilitating virus believed to cause loss of speech and cognitive abilities in the dwindling human population. The drug was given to Caesar’s pregnant mother, who then passed the drug’s effects to her child. Christian viewers will want to note the striking similarities between Caesar and Scripture’s Moses. In the first film, Caesar is initially sentenced to death, rescued as a baby and raised in the lap of luxury while his fellow apes are imprisoned in laboratories and zoos. Discovering how his fellow apes live, he runs away from his adoptive family and, by the end of the film, leads the apes out of captivity into the wilderness to start their own community. In the second film, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” Caesar is still the ape leader and is a kind of “law- giver” who presents three laws, or principles, by which the apes should live: 1) Ape not kill ape; 2) Apes together strong; and 3) Knowledge is power. He also deals with a rebellious ape, Koba (Toby Kebbell), who had previously been mistreated in a laboratory. The Moses of Scripture was sentenced to death because of who his mother was, a Hebrew woman (Ex. He was rescued from death, being drawn up out of the Nile River, and raised in the house of the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Then, seeing the plight of his true people, Moses ends up running away from his adoptive family (Ex. Ex. 6- 1. 4), toward the Promised Land. As their mediator, he gives the children of Israel the Ten Commandments from God (Ex. Deut. 5: 4- 2. 1) and has to deal with the rebellious Korah, the son of Izhar (Number 1. See the similarities?“War for the Planet of the Apes” maintains this analogy, and viewers heading into the new film will want to keep this in mind. For those who have already seen the film, it would be good to reflect on the rather obvious analogy director Matt Reeves and his writing partner, Mark Bomback, continue making. There are more points of comparison between Moses and Caesar scattered throughout the new film, but pointing them all out would spoil the fun of finding them as they appear. There are, however, a couple of other things to note. Greek letters are featured on human helmets, branded traitor/collaborator apes, and on buildings, trucks and other objects. Looking like an A and an upside- down U, they are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They are also the first letters of the Greek words Alpha and Omega, meaning “the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”Jesus describes Himself in Rev. In the film, the letters serve a dual purpose. They are an initial hint, and then a constant reminder that these soldiers and their Colonel are in some way connected with Christianity. Ultimately a scene confirms this when a cross is repeatedly shown in the Colonel’s office during a pivotal scene. Viewers are led to believe that the Colonel, while not a particularly virtuous Christian, is nonetheless a Christian. The second purpose of these letters is more metaphorical. They indicate these humans and all humans who converge at the Colonel’s encampment are hanging in the balance: Will the events of the film mean a new beginning for them or will it be their end, or at least the end of things as they know them? In addition, those Greek letters, also used in Christian art, figure prominently in the Book of Revelation, so their presence in the film has a kind of apocalyptic skew. Viewers also may want to ponder what it means that the film’s villains are militant Christians and the protagonists are enslaved apes easily identifiable with the children of Israel from the Old Testament account of the Exodus — complete with their own Moses. Caesar is haunted by thoughts and dreams of him and is left asking himself if he is truly just like Koba or is he better than him? Does Caesar have a destructive desire for personal vengeance, like Koba, that could jeopardize everything he and the other apes have built as a community? The wise orangutan, Maurice (Karin Konoval), makes an observation about Koba that sounds a lot like an admission of original sin when he says to Caesar, “Nobody can know the darkness that was inside of . You couldn’t have known that.”This comment comes earlier in the film, while Caesar still feels guilty about not understanding the depth of the darkness in Koba, a judgment that changes by the end of the film. There is another moment with a traitor/collaborator ape, Red Donkey (Ty Olsson). Caesar asks him if there is anything left inside him worth being saved — the implication being that Red Donkey and other apes like him have given themselves over to the darkness and no longer fight against it, making them no longer apes. Their collaboration with the humans is evidence of this and a violation of the law, “Apes together strong.” All this leads to a more important question: Is this really a film about humans and apes? Or is it an extended portrait of what it means to be human? A cautionary tale, perhaps, about the dangers of losing humanity and the cost of holding on to it in the face of adversity? As a genre, sci- fi is often the vehicle for talking about societal issues in an approachable, unassuming way. Think “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1. Cold War commentary, or “Children of Men” (2. What, then, is going on in these new “Planet of the Apes” films? If they are really movies about humans and apes, then the film has this tangible theme of misanthropy. The good humans, like the well- meaning scientist and researcher Will Rodman (James Franco), Caesar’s adoptive “father” from “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2. War for the Planet of the Apes” begins. The new film features only one truly positive human character: a young girl named Nova (Amiah Miller), who shows kindness toward the apes. Yet her “human” interactions with them are complicated, as she has succumbed to the debilitating virus that causes the loss of speech and cognitive abilities in humans. So is she even human anymore, since the Colonel lists speech and cognitive abilities as defining features of what it means to be human? With this reading, the movie presents a sort of “Snakes and Ladders” game, where the apes are climbing up the ladder toward humanity while the humans are sliding down the snakes toward a nonhuman, animal nature. This dichotomy is constantly expressed by showing the humans as “bad” and spiraling into chaos, and the apes (which humans categorize as animals) as “good,” ascending into a complex society. To help drive this home, there is another talking ape with the purposely ironic name “Bad Ape” (Steve Zahn) who is, in fact, very good and helpful. In the context of the scriptural analogy, the Colonel is clearly a kind of Pharaoh to Caesar’s Moses. Caesar even describes him as having no mercy — an indictment directed both toward the Colonel’s treatment of humans and apes, and a prophetic warning to Caesar himself. Is it the Colonel’s hardness of heart that makes him less than human? Or is he a human only because he can speak and think? Is it Caesar’s mercy that makes him human? Or is it his ability to speak and think? If the implied misanthropy — dislike of humankind and, by contrast, the celebration of “animal kind” — found in these films is misdirection, and they are less to do with comparing human nature and animal nature, and more to do with human nature specifically, then it becomes an interesting take on the darkness that lurks in the heart (Matt. The plague of original sin and its recurrent shadow lead men like St. Paul, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to write, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand” (Rom. This is a law Caesar can’t escape, a law the Colonel — and by extension, the viewers — can’t escape on their own. And in a Christian reading of the film, this law has no escape outside of Christ and the intervention of God, with the providential rescue found at the cross of Good Friday, prefigured scripturally in the Exodus account of crossing the Red Sea. If God is there, He is hidden — even though there is cultural evidence of Christianity and, through the Moses analogy, Old Testament Jewish cultural markers. That said, near the end of the film one moment could be viewed as a naturalistic coincidence, or a self- triggered retribution, or the providential hand of God. What viewers make of that moment will largely be determined by their worldview and/or the confession of faith they bring to the theater. With its thoughtful nods to the original series, “War for the Planet of the Apes” is a powerful entry into this rebooted franchise that shows no sign of losing momentum. If anything, this third film is the best yet — one part “The Ten Commandments” (1. The Great Escape” (1. Planet of the Apes” (1. Fans will be happy with this new film, and newcomers to the franchise will likely be interested in going back to watch previous installments. Again, this new series of films under the direction of Matt Reeves (whose next project is directing the upcoming Ben Affleck film, “The Batman”) proves increasingly thoughtful and serious as it unfolds, where, on the other hand, the original series only grew more and more corny and trite with each new release. Ted Giese (pastorted@sasktel. Mount Olive Lutheran Church, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; a contributor to the. Canadian Lutheran, Reporter Online and KFUO. Issues, Etc.” radio program. Follow Pastor Giese on Twitter @Rev. Ted. Giese. Posted July 2.
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