War for the Planet of the Apes is first-class filmmaking

Intelligence is a rare quality in a summer blockbuster so it is a delight to watch War for the Planet of the Apes and be most impressed by its ideas and its thoughtfulness. Despite what the trailers might have you believe this is a lot less action-packed and a lot more cerebral than I was expecting.

Not that it drags. It’s a carefully-staged, beautifully constructed and extremely considered piece of film making by Matt Reeves who, as a writer and director, goes from strength to strength with every project.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a film that looks back and looks forward at the same time. In terms of its influences it looks back to classic Hollywood films; the opening section is from Platoon (1986), the mid-section references The Searchers, (1956) and the final section touches on Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957) – a film incidentally written by the man who wrote the book which kicked off the Planet of the Apes franchise almost 50 years ago. There’s even, just to maintain its epic qualities, a nod to The Ten Commandments (1956) in the coda.

The mid-section is the most interesting. The film is set two years after Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his tribe have been fighting a guerrilla war. They have settled in the forests and left the cities to the humans. But one military faction led by The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) is intent on hunting them down.

After their initial tragic encounter, Caesar, just like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, sets off on an implacable quest for vengeance against The Colonel. This is Caesar as a warrior who has seen too many battles, he is weary and empty. He has looked into the abyss and, to paraphrase Blake, become what he beheld. There is more than a hint of the sort of character Charlton Heston – who was Taylor in the 1968 film – used to play in films like The War Lord (1965), El Cid (1961) and The Ten Commandments.

If Caesar is Ethan Edwards then Harrelson is Colonel Kurtz, a man who has gone native with disastrous consequences. It has to be said though that Caesar is the more individuated character, Harrelson is a little one-dimensional.

This mid-section also contains, for me, the film’s only mis-step with the addition of a new character called – ironically - Bad Ape and played by Steve Zahn. Bad Ape seems to be there as comic relief in a film that doesn’t really need it. Rather like Hank Worden as Mose Harper in The Searchers; it’s my favourite film but even I struggle to justify Worden’s inclusion other than as a member of the John Ford stock company.

War for the Planet of the Apes doesn’t really need this kind of sentiment, especially when they also have a sick child and an orphaned baby chimpanzee. To be honest I thought the character of Bad Ape was an irritation and a distraction from the bigger themes.

The triumph of the original series of Apes movies was their elliptical nature; the last one took us to the point where the first one became possible. The same thing happens in War for the Planet of the Apes. Reeves works very hard to set up the world that makes the 1968 film possible. By the end of this film we understand how humans de-evolved, where Nova comes from, the origins of the Alpha Omega cult, even the geography of the 1968 world including the Forbidden Zone.

All of this is testament to the sure-footed and meticulous way that Matt Reeves has made his film. He is a confident and single-minded director, not afraid to expect his audience to empathise with a simian lead character when it ponders the nature of humanity. Similarly Michael Seresin’s beautifully nuanced cinematography captures a world which is on the brink of retreating completely from the 21^st century.

None of this would work however without Andy Serkis’s stunning performance as Caesar. On the one hand you marvel at how far motion capture has come even over the three films, but the technology would be meaningless without the delicacy and subtlety of his performance. I think you can make a case for a Best Actor Oscar nomination here but if not that, then surely a special Academy Award to acknowledge his contribution to his craft.

One final plea. Can we stop here please? I know there is a talk from Reeves of a fourth film but there is an elegance about this trilogy. By the time we reach the end of this film George Taylor and his crew are already 50 years into their journey, and we know what happens when they land. Do we really need any more?