"War for the Planet of the Apes" is a 2017 American science fiction film. I just realized that I never reviewed it. Not sure why. Was I in a really bad mood when watching the story of Caesar and his band of intelligent chimps, orangs and gorillas? The film is the latest, but presumably not the last, installment in the apparently never-ending "Planet of the Apes" series.
In the in-house universe of the franchise, the plot of "War" is set a few decades before the very first film, "Planet of the Apes" from 1968 (the one with Charlton Heston getting a really good look at the Statue of Liberty). Or maybe not, since it seems the entire timeline has been rebooted! The main premise remains the same, however: an intelligent chimpanzee named Caesar leads a rebellion of enslaved apes, which eventually establishes simian dominion and the end of humanity as we know it.
In "War for the Planet of the Apes", most of humanity has been wiped out by a virus (sounds familiar?). Caesar and his ape followers live in the California wilderness, fighting an on-off war against the few remaining humans, who turn out to be split into several different factions. The leader of the Alpha-Omega death squad, simply called the Colonel, has discovered that the virus has mutated further, and now turns healthy humans into primitives, while the apes are immune. The Colonel (called Kerna by the apes) correctly deduces that this might spell the doom of Homo sapiens. Alpha-Omega therefore exterminates both smart apes and infected humans with equal gusto in an attempt to stop the inevitable.
An interesting plot twist is that this genocidal band of Homo has recruited gorilla hiwis, known as "donkeys", to aid their cause. Meanwhile, the US army (which - strangely enough - still exists) considers Alpha-Omega to be dangerous renegades and plans an attack on their compound. To get cheap labor to build a fortress, Kerna decides to enslave Caesar´s apes, which turns out to be a bad mistake. In the fiery finale, apes, "donkeys" and the two human factions fight it out until a huge avalanche puts an end to the martial fun! Caesar and most of his ape faithful manage to escape the apocalypto, and after a Biblical wandering in the desert find a promised land in a mysterious valley, which Caesar (like Moses) can´t enter.
The film explains (sort of) some of the plot elements of the 1968 "Planet of the Apes". Where did the doll in the cave come from? Why was Nova called by that name? How did the humans become mute and dumb? What about the scarecrows? Even the sea shore shown in the two films seems to be the same, which I suppose could create problems for any future reboots, since the plot of the 1968 film was supposedly set around New York, while the 2017 extravaganza is clearly in California!
What makes "War for the Planet of the Apes" (and its two immediate predecessors in the franchise) eerie is the virus-vaccine-mad scientist theme, which would surely make many people think of the present COVID pandemic. I´m surprised they haven´t banned these films outright! Note that the virus mutates and comes in waves, and that it originally came from a lab. Even the end of humanity as such doesn´t feel very far-fetched anymore. Climate change, however, is not an issue in this franchise, the nature being magnificent and almost a bit romantic. And while the Colonel sees Caesar as "the revenge of nature" against humanity´s pride, the talking chimp is rather a neo-human prophet representing all the best traits of our species, even to the point of succesfully fighting off his Shadow (while the Colonel fails to exorcize his own demons). Our legacy lives on inside Caesar´s virologically enhanced brain...
Something tells me we don´t have that escape hatch in real life.
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