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‘War of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: A Strong Visual Experience

With darkness and redemption, will the ‘War of the Planet of the Apes’ live up to it’s predecessors? 

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Mid-way through War of the Planet of the Apes, it becomes startling to notice how a film holds a specific meaning within a specific socio-temporal context. This wouldn’t have been the same film a mere five years back, when lines of divisibility weren’t as hard-lined and (hence) as seamless, as today.

True to its epic saga nature, the third instalment comes with an immersive visual experience and a wide eye on the moral compass of existence on earth. The Simian Flu has overtaken the human race and the fight for survival of the remaining, is bitter.

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With a firm, but fan-club-ish hat-tip to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, it attempts to go to the heart of the darkness within human intelligence, that has failed humans and is failing the apes as well, until they give up the hate and learn to co-exist.

Caesar’s clan is in strife with the human military faction called Alpha-Omega, led by a mysterious and merciless Colonel (Woody Harrelson). He also seems to be struggling with a broken soul, looking for redemption. He also happens to be bald and toweringly huge. He has captured the apes in a human zoo, working them as slaves before killing them. Driven by a deep personal loss, Caesar sets out on a one-man mission to annihilate the Colonel and in a scene almost a frame-like copy of Apocalypse Now, both meet their darkness and find their redemption.

With darkness and redemption, will the ‘War of the Planet of the Apes’ live up to it’s predecessors? 
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
(Photo Courtesy: Pinterest)
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The film is mounted on a scale as grand as one that fits the epic nature of the series, starting with the first blockbuster in 1968. The 3D adds a befitting layer of experience visually, dramatically and emotionally, leaving a forceful sensory impact. The monotone of the landscape, its vast greys and blacks, affirm the darkness of this universe, as the silence and sign language of the apes affirms its gravity.

The emotional decibel of the film however, seems to be simplistic with tried and tested heart-tugging moments, tear-jerker plot twists and the final appeal for peace being more a call of desperation than a call of vision. It harks back to the days of good old conscience even as Kung Fu Panda has long made compassion more relevant. This nature of its emotionality lessens its gravitas and effectively reduces the scope of the film, both morally and aesthetically as culturally relevant, much unlike its predecessors and especially Apocalypse Now, a film that is sadly reduced to wall graffiti in meme-language homage here.

With darkness and redemption, will the ‘War of the Planet of the Apes’ live up to it’s predecessors? 
Jack Black’s Kung Fu Panda.
(Photo Courtesy: Pinterest)
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The emotional quotient of the film rests unbearably heavy on the able shoulders of Andy Serkis, who, proves yet again that the accolades he continues to receive for his turn as Caesar are not meaningless. It is Woody Harrelson’s extremely woody Colonel that single-handedly draws the film down. Colonel, a man created in the shadow of Conrad’s Kurtz who had seen ‘the horror’ but never survived to tell the tale, is fraught with hate and agony. But where there was a deep stoniness in Brando’s silence, the raw rage of Harrelson’s Colonel turns him and his pain almost adolescent.

Darkness cannot ferment without a slow burn and horror cannot emerge until the darkness implodes.

When the Colonel implodes within his own darkness, he leaves us with a sense of mild and almost patronising confusion, unlike the sheer and haunting emptiness Kurtz left us with. And within that sheer and haunting emptiness lay the entirety of the message of the horror. Given our times, the message of War of the Planet of the Apes is pretty clear too. So clear that it is no longer about distant global events like the Vietnam War or Afro-American conflicts, but our daily lives. But a significant film is not the same as a deeply satisfying one, probably the difference between a The Dark Knight and Avengers. War of the Planet of the Apes aims at being both but manages to be only one.

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Topics:  Film Review 

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