Memory is such a funny – and fallible – thing.
With a new instalment in the Planet of the Apes franchise opening this weekend around the world I thought I should do some homework and re-watch the last film, War for the Planet of the Apes which came out in 2017.
I remembered watching it but not writing about it, so I set aside some time today to remedy that.
Just in case, this morning I double-checked. Nope, no sign of a review at the old Funerals & Snakes archive.
Then I thought – on the off-chance – I should probably have a look at the RNZ website.
And sure enough, I reviewed it during a stint filling in for Simon Morris on At the Movies back in July 2017. But as for what I said, I was still drawing a complete blank.
I’m pretty sure that I enjoyed it, or I wouldn’t be going down this road in the first place.
I try not to throw anything away, so I located the script for that show – one of the early ones that I did – deep on a hard drive:
It’s 15 years after a virus made apes smart and humans mostly dead. The first intelligent ape, Caesar, played as always by the extraordinary Andy Serkis, has saved his tribe from a battle with the frightened remains of human civilisation but he knows they aren’t safe. He’s also bothered by the fact that he broke their only commandment – ape shall not kill ape – in the last film. There’s a relentless human colonel – Woody Harrelson – on their trail and he’s sent his son to find an escape route to the east, out of the California forests and across the desert.
Yes, you heard it right, Harrelson’s character is called Kurtz* in honour of the shaven-headed Brando character from Apocalypse Now. Harrelson even channels the great Brando in his performance, swallowing underplayed lines and fondling his shaven head. I love Woody but this is an impersonation not a performance.
On the way to his eventual confrontation with Kurtz, Caesar meets a former circus chimpanzee and comic relief called Bad Ape (played by Steve Zahn) and a mute human child they eventually call Nova (Amiah Miller). It turns out Kurtz has gone rogue and what’s left of the human military can’t stand him either, but they don’t care about the problems of a few scrawny apes. They’re going to bomb the whole place into oblivion.
Kurtz has managed to capture Caesar’s tribe and is building battlements using the ape slave labour. He’s not going down without a fight (fought by other people and other species for the most part). But he’s obviously damaged goods and the tense face-offs between noble-but-doubtful Caesar and certain-but-bonkers Kurtz are triumphant dramatic moments.
The wonderful work that Wētā have done to support the performances from Serkis and his colleagues kind of goes with saying these days, but I want to especially commend New Zealand cinematographer Michael Seresin who, when he isn’t making wine and olive oil in Marlborough, has been lending his talent to making the utterly fantastical seem completely believable in films like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the previous Apes movie, Rise.
The forests of British Columbia also do stirling work standing in for Northern California.
At the end of the film, Caesar leads his flock into the promised land, a landscape recognisable from the original Heston picture but a continent away from the iconic Statue of Liberty shot that closed that film – am I the only one bothered by that ridiculous geography? Alright, just me then. He doesn’t have tablets with commandments but Moses should’ve been his name, not Caesar. There’s even a sequence that brings to mind the parting of the Red Sea – or at least it did for me.
Director Matt Reeves has pulled off something remarkable here. A giant blockbuster that has more to say about the human state – and the state of humans – than most art films. And he pulls no punches. This isn’t our planet any more, we’ve given up our rights to it. Whatever happens next, we deserve.
*In that review I had thought that the Harrelson character was actually called Kurtz. Memory playing tricks once again.
In the credits he’s just known as ‘The Colonel’ but in last night’s re-watch I clearly saw a nametag on his uniform and it isn’t Kurtz. I made that up all by myself! The rest of the observations stand.
I was pleased to remind myself that there were two other good films in that programme: Timothy Spall and Ian Paisley and Colm Meaney as Martin McGuinness in the Irish ‘troubles’ film The Journey, and an animated epic from France about a child’s journey to the Arctic, Long Way North.
Where to watch War for the Planet of the Apes
Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK: Streaming on Disney+
USA: Streaming on Hulu, Max, TNT, TBS, TruTV (I don’t know what half of those are)
Correction
I’ve been asked to point out to New Zealand subscribers that the two other Scandinavian films that I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Diana’s Wedding and The Jonsson Gang, are both available to rent on the AroVision platform. The oversight is regretted.
Further reading
I reviewed some new streaming feature releases for RNZ yesterday: Bill Nighy coaching the English squad for the Homeless World Cup in The Beautiful Game (Netflix), music helps a grieving woman time travel in The Greatest Hits (Hulu in the US, Disney+ everywhere else), and Anne Hathaway falls for pop star Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You (Prime Video).