My intention is not to be a broken record with my reviews of these movies, but once again we have a misleading title with War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).  With Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), we got the beginning of the end of human civilization.  I would argue that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) gave us more of a war than today’s film.  As for War for the Planet of the Apes, the prevailing conflict seems to be more between what is left of mankind than fighting between human and ape.  Further, I pointed out when discussing those other two that the line between the two opposing forces is so thin as to be non-existent.  Well, it gets further blurred with a new disease that is rendering what remains of humanity unable to speak.  As I recall, one of the things that kept me away from seeing these flicks in the theater were, to my mind, the strangeness of their titles.  I recall seeing them, rolling my eyes, and mentally crossing them off my list.  This was before I had a movie review blog to maintain.  It all adds up to some rather unmemorable cinema that I will likely forget after a week or two, if lucky.

After getting us up to speed with a synopsis of the previous two films, War for the Planet of the Apes shows us a group of human soldiers moving through the redwood forest in search of the ape settlement led by Caesar (Andy Serkis).  They find what they refer to as a trench and manage to surprise the primates guarding it.  Yet, the simians quickly rally and overwhelm their attackers.  Caesar himself comes to inspect those captured.  This includes Red (Ty Olsson), a gorilla working for the humans to which they refer to as a “donkey.”  Caesar thinks apes like Red do it because they oppose him and seek protection from the other side.  With the others, Ceasar lets them return to the mysterious Colonel J. Wesley McCullough (Woody Harrelson), the military leader tasked with hunting down Caesar’s band.  They are to deliver a message to Colonel McCullough: that the human soldiers should leave the apes alone and there will be no more bloodshed.  Among Caesar’s followers is an albino gorilla named Winter (Aleks Paunovic).  Winter does not like letting the humans go, and eventually goes to Colonel McCullough and gives away the location of the secret ape base.  The soldiers attack shortly after Caesar’s eldest son, Blue Eyes (Max Lloyd-Jones), returns from a scouting mission.  Blue Eyes has found a place where the primates can live away from human contact in peace.  Unfortunately, he, along with Cornelia (Judy Greer), Caesar’s wife, are killed by Colonel McCullough in this most recent raid.  Caesar orders the rest to move on to this location without him while he goes after Colonel McCullough to avenge his fallen family.  A few of Caesar’s stalwart, longtime companions will not let him go alone, including the wise orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval).  Despite the fact that we are shown a journey, it is this point that the movie comes to a crawl as we watch four simians trek into the snowy mountains in search of Colonel McCullough.  To break up the monotony, we are given two new characters.  The first is a little human girl Maurice eventually names Nova (Amiah Miller).  Caesar and his companions find her alone at a seaside camp believed to have been occupied by the soldiers.  She is the one that displays the condition mentioned in the introduction.  It is Maurice that takes pity on her, saying that she should come with them.  The other they encounter is a new talking chimpanzee going by “Bad Ape” (Steve Zahn).  He is able to point Caesar in the direction of Colonel McCullough’s base of operations.  Yet, when they get there, they find that the rest of the apes have been captured by the humans en route to their new location.  This complicates matters for Caesar, who had simply wanted to get his revenge and be done with it.  He learns this news from a chimp he finds essentially crucified outside of Colonel McCullough’s camp.  On the heels of this revelation, Caesar is also captured.  Instead of killing his longtime foe, Colonel McCullough puts Caesar to work constructing a wall around their perimeter at the foot of a snowcapped mountain.  When he refuses to be a slave, Caesar is brought before Colonel McCullough.  In this meeting, the officer reveals that all is not well in the human world.  I am a bit fuzzy on the details, despite having just watched it, but it looks as if Colonel McCullough’s methods are frowned upon by the rest of humanity.  He began killing people infected with the new disease rather than watching them turn into what he considers the equivalent of apes.  The rest of the army is expected to attack Colonel McCullough any day, which is why he is making these preparations.  It also gives Caesar added impetus to act.  It is his friends on the outside who act, finding a secret entrance into the compound.  They use a conveniently pre-dug tunnel to get all the primates out just before the arrival of more soldiers.  Still, Caesar cannot let go of his desire for vengeance, and decides to stay behind while the others get out.  As the bullets finally begin to fly, he finds a sick Colonel McCullough, having fallen victim to the disease he so hated.  Caesar does not stick around to watch the human commit suicide, but instead grabs a brace of hand grenades he intends to use to blow up the wall.  He is mortally wounded in the process, but is successful in his endeavor.  He is actually too successful, for the detonations trigger a landslide that wipe out the victorious soldiers in a wave of snowy debris.  The apes survive by clinging to trees.  Once this ordeal is over, they head to where Blue Eyes had wanted to direct them.  Caesar is able to make it there with them, but dies upon reaching the summit overlooking the lakeside oasis, Maurice by his side.

To reiterate what I said in the introduction to this review of War for the Planet of the Apes, I hope my synopsis underscored how misleading is the title.  Much of the movie is wandering through a wintry landscape in search of Colonel McCullough.  The film has an Apocalypse Now (1979) vibe to it, with Colonel McCullough easily fitting into the same vein as Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando).  Arguably, the only difference with War for the Planet of the Apes, aside from the obvious, is the fact that Caesar’s mission is more personal.  Yet, the two characters share an unhinged zealousness for their cause, which is made all the more aggravating for this Catholic reviewer by the fact that they imbue Colonel McCullough’s lot with Christian undertones.  For starters, they refer to their outfit as the Alpha and Omega platoon.  Their base has a large American flag decorated with those Greek letters.  These are terms that Jesus gave to himself because He is, in fact, the beginning and the end.  The Bible bears this out at many points, though we have yet to get to the omega part.  It is a common theme in post-apocalyptic films that the survivors tend to see these events in Biblical terms.  The problem with doing so is that we really do not know when the end times will come, or how, but we will know it when they do.  There have been a few Christian sects over the years that have claimed to have done the calculations and come up with an exact year, only to be proven wrong.  This is information that only God knows, not Colonel McCullough or any other so-called Christian for that matter.  It is a subject on which I meditate from time-to-time, wondering when it will happen.  What I always come back to is the notion that, to God, time is meaningless.  To us, it might look like the second coming will never take place.  To those in the film, they might think it has already occurred, and Colonel McCullough is just trying to speed things along.  Whatever the case, I doubt it will happen like we see in the movie.

That might be a silly thing to say, but sometimes we get movies like War for the Planet of the Apes that get people wondering if it could actually happen.  Such speculations are the stuff of Reddit comment boards, and thankfully few other places.  That they exist at all, though, tells you the kind of impact film can have on people that they would bother to take the time to have such discussions.  I am not sure what is a bigger waste of time: watching these movies are taking part in such a chat.