war on the planet of the apes full movie

War on the planet of the apes full movie movie#
War on the planet of the apes full movie series#

He’s a leader of apes, and men could learn from him too. His eyes carry shadows of sorrow and flickers of hope. The anchor character of those movies and of this one is the chimp Caesar, played, via motion-capture technology, by Andy Serkis. 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 tensions flare between them and the relatively few surviving humans.

War on the planet of the apes full movie movie#

But that original “Planet of the Apes” imagined the apes as rising out of the evolutionary ashes.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 apes–the virus that has made them so smart is lethal to humans–break out of a Northern California research facility and scamper to freedom in a redwood forest. Back in 1968, with World War II a recent memory and the Cold War raging, the destruction of humanity was envisioned as self-inflicted, the result of nuclear war. There’s a disease going around that is robbing humans of speech and making them less intelligent, a kind of airborne Alzheimer’s that can hit anybody. Though things look grim for the apes at the start of the movie, the humans don’t have it all that great themselves. He is in too much emotional pain to be anything but cruel, because if he stopped being horrible, he’d have no defense against his inner torment. In Harrelson’s insightful rendering, the Colonel has gone off some existential edge, and there’s no reaching him. He has an encounter with Caesar in the middle of the film, a long conversation in which he explains his ideas and his personal history, and Harrelson makes it a fascinating glimpse into a troubled personality. Woody Harrelson as the human Colonel, whose ambition is to kill every ape in existence and save the Earth for his own species, is the supposed villain of the piece, but the movie grants him his reasons and lots of backstory to play. But the collaboration resulted in something notable and impressive. It is hard to know where to allocate the praise - either to the actors with the electrodes on their faces or to the technicians who converted their expressions into performances.

Steve Zahn plays a chimpanzee known as Bad Ape, a timid fellow with the gift of speech who is traumatized by things he has seen. Andy Serkis as Caesar carries himself as if the fate of the world rested on his choices and seems very much a great man, albeit not a man. In a movie heavy with special effects - we take those apes for granted, but they are computer generated through a process called performance capture - “War” has at least three strong performances. But all the momentum seems to be heading toward confrontation.

Caesar - the Lincoln/Gandhi of the apes - wants a cease-fire and envisions a world in which humans and apes can live in harmony. The humans have scattered the ape forces and are putting the prisoners into zoos, which aren’t really zoos, but massive holding pens for thinking beings. “War” picks up the story at a difficult point for our simian brethren. But in the new film, “War for the Planet of the Apes” - the best of the series, by far - the series’ viewpoint comes into focus, and it’s a lot more intricate and enlightened than some unthinking death wish. In the new series’ first two films, audiences were asked to root on this inevitability, which was difficult.

War on the planet of the apes full movie series#

The “X-Men” movies and even to an extent the recent deluge of superhero pictures all deal, to some degree, with the coming obsolescence or helplessness of normal human beings, the implicit idea being that all just should accept this fact and walk in neat, undisturbed lines into the abyss.īut no series has been so obvious in its viewpoint as the new “Planet of the Apes” series, a three-movie prequel to the original “Planet of the Apes” (1968), which ended with Charlton Heston screaming on the beach about mankind’s self-destruction. It’s a downright weird thing when a species starts making movies celebrating that possibility. It is a terrible thing when a species realizes that evolution is not on its side.