War for the Planet of the Apes – Movie Review

War for the Planet of the Apes – PG-13
Release Date: Fri 14 Jul 2017

2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes had its positives and negatives. The positives include Andy Serkis’ seamless performance capture and some of the most realistic apes ever made by a machine. The negatives included some predictability and some flat characters among mostly the human side.

War for the Planet of the Apes does not suffer from those negatives. It begins in a similar setting to Dawn’s forest and a similar situation. Caesar, the leader of the apes makes a final appeal to the humans to just let them live in peace in the forest. The entire movie is from Caesar’s point of view, and so our only interactions with the humans (led by Woody Harrelson) also involve the ape cast.

There are allegories to human warfare – this is a Planet of the Apes movie after all. The movie never beats these over the audience’s head, but they’re there to find.

Each of this new Planet of the Apes trilogy has had the benefit of technical progress. It’s a rare trilogy where each entry is arguably better if not at least as good as what came before. You can certainly understand War for the Planet of the Apes without watching the other two films, but I do recommend seeing the other two first. They’re worth your time, and War for the Planet of the Apes is worth seeing in theaters.

Matthew, Cal and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion in the car: