‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Is a Very Serious Movie, but It Didn’t Need to Be

Here’s a movie pitch: Woody Harrelson rules over a kingdom of CGI apes. Disaster ensues. A comedy? I’d like to think so. But here comes War for the Planet of the Apes, the final volume of the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise, out to spite me. This is a capital S, capital M, Serious Movie. Here’s how I know. It’s got a runtime of two hours and 20 minutes, but it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow, which means it’s definitely not a comedy, because who else in comedy would dare. It’s got the Serious Movie Starter Kit™ color palette, too, its hues averaging out to something between gray and grayer, as if the director, Matt Reeves, had consulted a mood board composed of a slab of wet concrete when dreaming up the movie.

More urgently, however, War for the Planet of the Apes has got heavy themes, bolstered with references to other heavy movies. War is nothing if not ambitious. It is about the fight for the survival of two rival species: humans, who are still being wiped out by the lethal Simian flu, which originated as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease; and apes, who were once the test subjects for said treatment, but who were accidentally made hyperintelligent, and thus threatening, by it. It’s a war "for the planet," but the apes aren’t colonizers, really. They just want to survive. Led by the valiant, mean-mugging Caesar (Andy Serkis), the apes want to live separately, but equally. "Leave us the woods and the killing can stop," offers Caesar. If the humans had only accepted, they’d have saved themselves, and saved us from this movie.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a basic allegory that flirts, dangerously, with becoming an outright social issue drama. In it, we see the apes become a true underclass. They get captured by the military and sentenced to labor in a prison camp run by an erratic, nameless colonel (Harrelson). The Colonel needs the free labor to build a border wall — never mind why — and the apes (among them the still-young Cornelius, hero of the original franchise) get beaten, starved, and forced to work. They’re treated like slaves. This status is fairly unambiguous from the get-go, but the movie wants to make sure you feel the weight of its subject. So, in an audacious move, Reeves and Co. reenact a scene from an actual slavery movie: Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning whipping in Glory. Maybe you remember it: a stony Denzel, his face toward the camera, wincing with each stroke of the whip but, memorably, trying to avoid showing his pain. It’s a scene of quiet rebellion. That’s the takeaway in War, too, as we watch Caesar get whipped in much the same way, the camera closing in on that prideful, implacable face.

Some day, I’m sure I’ll be in the mood to tease out just what’s so pathetic about a rebellious black former slave getting reimagined as a humanoid ape in a blockbuster. But why go there? I’m not offended: I’m bored. War for the Planet of the Apes is being hailed as "the best franchise film in recent memory," which is in large part, I reckon, because it tries so hard to seem more thoughtful and relevant than other franchise movies. The movie is bait for those of us who want to feel like our time spent with blockbusters should be somehow enriching, and not merely entertaining. That’s a nice idea … I guess. There’s no rule that says a genre movie can’t aspire to moral seriousness. But blockbusters — and all other movies — should resist conflating moral seriousness with taking themselves too seriously.

It isn’t that a Planet of the Apes movie can’t raise appreciable moral questions. It’s that darkening the palette, extending the runtime, fleshing it all out with polite melodrama, and regurgitating respected non-genre movies (Glory, Spartacus, Apocalypse Now) doesn’t make a film inherently serious. War has little to add to its references besides shadow and grit. It’s an empty shell of a movie — but it looks great, and it’s very good at appearing to be more than it is. There’s the soft trickling of its piano-led score, a funeral dirge in minimalist clothing that’s trying to tell us how tasteful this all is. There’s a tasteful shyness in its depiction of some of the violence, too. Early on, a barrage of arrows shot at soldiers is barely seen to rip into any flesh. Only late in the movie does shit really hit the fan, and even then, it all remains remarkably depersonalized. A surprising and infuriating murder early on is more or less what gets the movie’s gears going. But there’s an odd hesitancy to explore that violence, to mine it for how it feels or what it means.

I felt this way about the last Apes movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, too, except that time, I made the mistake of taking the movie at its word. In Dawn, Koba, an ape initially depicted with empathy as a test lab survivor who’d harbored lingering rage for humans, got implausibly morphed into a brainless, violent megalomaniac, a villain motivated less by psychological complexity than by studio-mandated Manichean bullshit. The empathy of the movie’s opening act apparently brushed up against other demands; by the time the movie reached its "Burn, baby, burn!" final act, I’d not only lost any sense of Koba’s motives or personality, I’d stopped caring that he was, according to the principles of the movie, supposed to be a victim.

Koba’s spirit hovers over War, particularly in the heart of Caesar, who worries that he, too, will turn out to be a needless asshole. "I did not start this war," Caesar says. "The ape who did is Koba. I killed him." It’s not enough. Like its predecessor, which was also directed by Reeves, War starts off with a long tour of the home lives of the apes. Plot-wise, they’re hiding out in a forest on a brief reprieve from the ongoing battle against what’s left of the military; the reprieve is fatally short. Movie-wise, they’re of course frontloaded here for the sake of showing off. Entire scenes proceed without human actors; Andy Serkis gets to flex. Caesar’s face and presence dominate the screen with an Old Hollywood charisma. He grimaces with the best of them, a grizzled movie veteran who happens to be pure, digitized fiction. In the film’s best moments, the other apes’ painstakingly detailed faces fill the screen, to the point of making it almost impossible to see anything else. There’s no immediate takeaway from these images, just a sensibility, which is why I love them: they’re a way of seeing the characters distinctly without needing to remind us of where they fit in the movie’s grand allegory.

Better that, at least, than the corny politics that define the characters otherwise: Caesar’s textbook insistence that he’s pro-ape rather than anti-human (yawn), Harrelson’s descent into an outright Colonel Kurtz parody (I’m schleep). Reeves, whose next project is The Batman, really has learned a lot from serious dramas, but he’s learned only the most trite lessons from the most tedious among them. Like a bad civil rights movie, War ennobles its underclass by airbrushing the facts of who those characters are while also, like a good blockbuster, hyper-realizing what technology makes it possible for those characters to look like. It’s been funny to note that all this CGI magic is performed in favor of characters who for the most part don’t add up to much more than basic tropes. That is not, despite a reputation for meaninglessness, what happens in a great genre movie — not even a great blockbuster, not that anyone can remember what that means. War for the Planet of the Apes tries to surpass our expectations of blockbusters, and that’s really too bad: The best movie it could possibly have been — a delicious but thoughtful thrill ride — is the one it’s refusing to be.