War for the Planet of the Apes: Slow drama of the Apes

Cast: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn

Rated: 7/10

For war junkies, blood-enthusiasts and thrill-kill punks, these apes ain’t doing all of that. They are into serious survival and relocation efforts helmed stunningly by director Matt Reeves. They have no revengeful and vicious Koba amongst them this time. They have a Caesar to lead them — pacifist, reasonable, emotional and yet a warrior when it comes to it.

So, in literal terms, this ape edition of the three-part series popping up regularly on the Hollywood horizon since 2011, carries a misleading title of war. There’s very little of it, most of being fixated in the opening sequence. The rest is about Caesar trying to build peace and home under the advancing threat of humans.

But that does not make it any less riveting despite being a slow-paced, emotion-intensive landscape-hopping drama, featuring apes as the real humans and humans as a xenophobic band of troops with a crazed out colonel in an unreasonable elimination mode.

Amid all this mental rather than physical strife, lies the other gem of the movie — its stunning visual artistry. The stark aerial views of a snow-covered landscape, glacial lakes, Amazonian forests, forceful waterfalls and bewildering greens whenever they come in, gives the film its potent mood — sombre, Spartan and complex.

Unlike theRise and Dawn prequels, in this one Caesar gives you all the life lessons — peaceful co-existence, tolerance and of course, in a sideshow, respect of the environment.

Played with acumen by the immensely gifted English actor and director Andy Serkis, Caesar speaks with his eyes more than the polished English he has learnt as part of a super species created due to a virus experiment gone wrong way back in 2011.

Serkis, whom you may know better as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, King Kong of the 2005 film and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, not to mention as Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is the mainstay of the film.

As leader-warrior, father-husband, Caesar undertakes a long journey to end the terror reign of the colonel after he sneaks into his lair, kills his wife and son and dumps Caesar in the deep and dangerous waterfall. The journey to the Colonel’s den and back to liberty is full of thick sequences, twists, turns and a whole lot of ape bonhomie. There are atrocities, labour camps, virus talk and a whole lot of give and take of togetherness between the main characters of the show —Maurice the orangutan, Luka the chimp and Bad Ape, the chimp from the zoo.

Exceptional drama to go to this week.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 16 July, 2017