War for the Planet of the Apes is a genuinely satisfying morality tale

War for the Planet of the Apes is definitely the most fable-like movie in the rebooted Apes trilogy, with its starkly defined war of good apes against evil humans. But it's also the most character-driven story too. With War, it becomes clear that this trilogy has actually been the biography of one person, Caesar, who grew from humble origins as a lab animal to become one of Earth's greatest heroes.

There is something cheesy yet stirringly genuine about the way War lionizes its main character, making him both noble and relatable. Partly this comes down to Andy Serkis, the world's first truly brilliant mocap actor, who fills Caesar's face with thoughtful, grim determination. But it's also about a simple design choice, which was to make the uplifted apes' eyes transform into human eyes. When the camera looks at Caesar, we can't help but see the face of a person, despite the fur and thick brow ridges.

A fascinating character study

This is particularly important in War, where the humans and apes finally switch roles. One of the signature details in the original series is that many humans in the far future have lost the ability to speak. Flung nearly 2,000 years into the future, astronaut Charlton Heston finds wild humans living like apes once did. In War, we see how this situation came about.

Compared to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which was about conflicts within the ape and human communities, War tells a very straightforward ape-vs-human tale. Caesar and the apes have retreated deep into the Sierras, living peacefully in a village hidden behind a waterfall. But the humans, led by the quasi-religious authoritarian Colonel (Woody Harrelson, in full psycho mode), spend all their time hunting down what they call "the kong." One particularly vicious raid leaves Caesar forever shaken.

Now Caesar must lead his people to safety, but his usual wisdom has been compromised by a lust for revenge against the Colonel. Against his advisors' better judgement, Caesar goes on a secret mission to the Colonel's base on the California border. Along the way we witness the final death throes of human society. The few remaining humans seem to be living in military units, and one by one they are being struck down by a new permutation of the virus that leaves them unable to speak. When Caesar and his advisors find a young, mute girl, the always-ethical orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval) rescues her and names her Nova.

The kindness that Maurice and the other apes show Nova stands in stark contrast to the Colonel's behavior. We discover that he's been executing anyone who goes mute, fearing that it will leave humans vulnerable to ape conquest. The Colonel is basically an American version of Pol Pot, ruling through discipline, ideology, and torture.

At this point in the trilogy, there are basically no good humans anymore. We have the sweet, innocent Nova, but all the other Homo sapiens are hyper-militarized death junkies who try to kill each other when they aren't enslaving or torturing apes. Not a lot of subtlety to be found here, except when it comes to Caesar. We watch his psychological struggle as he tries to overcome his base instinct for revenge, and find hope even when all seems lost. Somehow, because this is a character study of an ape rather than a human, this standard "hero in doubt" arc doesn't feel like a cliché. It feels real.

Reboot vs. original

When critics compare writer/director Matt Reeves' rebooted Apes to the original five-movie series (let us not speak of the Tim Burton abomination), they often say Reeves' version is more realistic. But the most important difference between the two versions isn't silly/fantastical vs. realistic/gritty. It's that the original was fundamentally a time travel story. In fact, it's one of those classic closed-loop deals, where we get uplifted apes in the present because Caesar's parents time-traveled from the 3900s to the 1980s. (I wrote about the crazy Apes timeline here, and there's even a helpful chart.) So basically the future apes created themselves through time travel. The entire first franchise involves shuttling back and forth between the present and far future, and there are plenty of meetings between the civilized apes and their civilized human counterparts.

There are absolutely no time travel shenanigans in Reeves' Ape trilogy, nor much of a chance for humans and apes to meet as equals. We start with a hard apocalypse when a deadly pandemic decimates humanity in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Unrelatedly, a scientist has invented a drug that can uplift apes, giving them human-equivalent cognition, the ability to speak, and those human eyes I mentioned earlier. You might say that Reeves replaced the time travel trope with a plague apocalypse and a biotech miracle.

This makes a huge difference in terms of the story Reeves is able to tell in his movies. We focus in on Caesar and the ape culture he's creating, and the worldbuilding is all about contrasting the ape way of life with the human. Though the apes could choose to live anywhere in the dead world, they decide to live something like indigenous people in the Americas. They have guns, horses, and some tools, but they live in simple wood houses and seem to be surviving as hunter-gatherers. The humans, meanwhile, live in the trashed remains of their cities, trying to rebuild the electrical grid (in Dawn) or the military (in War).

Instead of being a time travel story, it's as if the Apes reboot is playing with an alternate timeline where the indigenous way of life rules the Americas and the industrialized types die in a plague. There's also an interesting hint of ape spirituality developing in War. Caesar eventually becomes a Moses-like figure, leading his people out of bondage and into a promised land.

Too grimdark?

Though it's both thought-provoking and exciting, there is one problem with War. Its future is so grimdark that at times it becomes absurd. When we get to the Colonel's camp, it’s like a combination of every terrible thing in recent human history: concentration camps, the Vietnam War, the slavery of African Americans, the extermination of indigenous people, etc. Yes, we get that humans are bad. But why are they so uniformly evil? Did all the good humans die between Dawn and War?

The answers don't really matter. We need the humans to be utterly unredeemable if we're going to buy into Caesar's ape Utopia. Only when the humans are complete garbage, or completely mute, does the ape takeover seem justified.

Interestingly, the original Apes series ended with Caesar changing the timeline so that humans and uplifted apes wind up living peacefully together. In War for the Planet of the Apes, that's not an option. Despite this darker scenario, it's still fantastically gripping to watch Caesar liberate his people from the Colonel's iron fist—and prove that humans are not the only great leaders on this planet.