Chesley Brain Dump — Organized Thoughts about Apes 3

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Organized Thoughts about Apes 3

Unlike my earlier post about Spider-Man/Baby Driver, I have a more coherent organization for my thoughts about Matt Reeves’s excellent War for the Planet of the Apes. I want to explain why it’s not as good a movie as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes but is nearly as good. There are spoilers galore here, but I don’t think it’s possible to spoil the emotional power of this movie and the plot itself is simple and predictable. 


There’s nothing per se wrong with obvious parable, when it’s done well. Walter Chaw, I think, has overthought this movie somewhat when he bemoans the confusion of its metaphor: 

Too, it confuses the characters of its parables in such a way as to suggest, uncomfortably, a connection between Jews and their persecutors, and a concentration camp/Egyptian slave narrative involving the persecution of apes for cheap labour only adds to the confusion.

Caesar has long been the apes’ Moses, starting way back at the searing “NO” scene at the first climax of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. (Aside: does Caesar speaking more diminish the power of his dialog? Inclined to say it’s irrelevant because his lines are so good.) Here, the Moses story is more obvious, even if it is told in a different order. Caesar plans to send his people through a desert to find a promised land. That trip is interrupted by a mad man who enslaves Caesar’s people and puts them to work on an egomaniacal construction project until Caesar frees his people and, in the process, drowns the captors under precipitation via act of God. 

Woven into this story is an extended Apocalypse Now bit. AO Scott wrote that Woody Harrelson’s character went “full Heart of Darkness, staging a one-man remake of ‘Apocalypse Now.’” The second part is right; the first is not. I don’t think this movie has anything to do with Conrad’s story. What Harrelson does is deliberately evoke the visual signifiers of Apocalypse Now without any of the actual meaning underneath. The movie underlies this with obvious jokes of its own (”Ape-Ocalypse Now” written in an evacuation tunnel under Harrelson’s base by some escaping human–perhaps herself a film lover who saw through Harrelson’s self-aggrandizing adoption of Brando.) This is Apocalypse Now as meme. 

Harrelson’s actual motivation is not the same as Kurtz in Heart of Darkness or Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Those men are colonizers driven mad by the allure of being the all-powerful white god to non-whites. Harrelson’s unnamed Colonel (though his jacket says McCullough, he is credited only as “The Colonel”–apparently too much to ask for the jacket to just say Kurtz) is not trying to colonize anything. He’s trying to “purify.” His only motivation is killing. I choose to read the movie’s connections to Apocalypse Now as The Colonel’s choice and his choice alone. He cloaks himself in the symbology of a colonizer to justify killing. 

This reading, I think, clears up some of the confusion Chaw has about the parables here. Caesar becomes not just Moses, but Christ, to the apes. And why should he not be? He is the bringer of salvation to the apes, dating back to Rise. He has brought them out of captivity not once, but twice. And (unsurprising spoiler) he dies so that they may grow on without him. 

This is a simple movie that holds so much meaning. Some of it is obvious on the surface (see this tweet). Some of it is not. That some of it is “too ‘on-the-nose’” as Chaw wrote does not mean that as a whole the movie is. There’s still so much to unpack. A great feature of this movie is that it is so political on its surface but that there is even more meaning below that. 

Some other random thoughts: I basically never want serious blockbusters to have funny moments because they, for whatever reason, gives theater audiences the gall to start talking. When serious stuff is happening, the theater is quiet. When something funny happens, the laughing turns to chatter. I have no idea why this is. 

The score was underwhelming. Andy Sirkis is amazing. Watching some clips of Rise it’s remarkable how much the mo-cap technology has improved in just the last 6 years.