I definitely felt the trepidation about returning to this franchise, especially after the strength of the Caesar trilogy. Matt Reeves was passing the buck to Wes Ball, who made one good Maze Runner film, and some mediocre sequels, so I wasn’t sure what to think. Honestly, this film isn’t even running on star power here. The biggest featured actor not doing motion capture work is Frea Allen, and Owen Teague is taking the very tall order left behind by Andy Serkis as the main motion capture actor. Caesar is gone, 300 years have passed, and our Apes are in a very different place.
This franchise is near and dear to me enough that I saw this in theatres. I ventured out, dealt with the accessibility issues, and tried my best to focus on the film. I wasn’t really disappointed. There’s definitely something missing here, but it isn’t a far cry from the previous films. We are now in a world where the apes have broken off into tribes, and a lot more of them can talk. They still sign, but talking isn’t so limited as it had been. Noah is a young ape, part of the Eagle Clan, whoa re apes who bond with Eagles and use them to hunt. Their village is attacked, and Noah is left for dead. After rising, he is determined to find his missing family and friends, and take a journey across treacherous landscapes to get there.
Along the way, he’ll meet up with an orangutan that seems to really remember a lot of Caesar’s teachings, a young woman who is seemingly unaffected by the virus that has left nearly every other human in this film in a feral state, and finally the big bad of the film, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Proximus checked off the box of being a villain memorable enough to help carry this film, as so many films die because the villain is too dull or underdeveloped, or even worse, generic. Proximus prides himself that he has a human captive (William H Macy), that has been reading these books to him so he can get all this knowledge, and a little bit of knowledge is clearly a very dangerous thing. He’s willing to do anything to get what he wants, all under the guise of helping advance the apes, but what he’s doing looks a little like slavery. So, Noah has to figure out a way to outsmart a tyrant, whose forces had already defeated him once. Can he save his Eagle tribe? can he trust this remaining human?
I’m sure this looks fantastic, and the audio description here done by Deluxe really tries to capture the beauty of just being out in the wilderness, even if the wilderness is a lot of abandoned cities that are just overgrown.There’s certainly a lesson here about things coming full circle, as Proximus gains knowledge, he wants the technology the humans developed knowing the importance of making an evolutionary jump. And, it’s pretty cool to see chimps and eagles in this symbiotic relationship.
While Noah is the star, it’s really Proximus Caesar who stole the show for me, as very much a worst case scenario for our original Caesar. That someone would dare to bend his words, and manipulate them to do what Proximus is doing would really create an interesting arc if this was still an Andy Serkis film. But the 300 years gives it a fresh feeling. I really disliked the ending. I can’t talk about it, because it is super spoilery, but I really strongly dislike the ending. When I got to it, it had some shockwave ramifications for things that had happened earlier, and soured some moments I had previously enjoyed. I know they are hoping to make a sequel, and this is on pace to outgrows War For The Planet Of The Apes, so a sequel is likely. I’m way less excited for what that might look like.
It won’t be in the top list of films for me at the end of the year, but I’m very happy I saw it, and I think fans of the trilogy will enjoy this extension. I’m guessing maybe one Oscar nomination for visual effects. I wish I could critique the audio description more, but the experience I had theatrically was just not conducive to that, which sadly seems to be a recurring thing when i venture out to theatres.
Final Grade: B+
