Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 7 May

War for the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2017)

Memory is such a funny – and fal­lible – thing.

With a new instal­ment in the Planet of the Apes fran­chise open­ing this week­end around the world I thought I should do some home­work and re-watch the last film, War for the Planet of the Apes which came out in 2017.

I remembered watch­ing it but not writ­ing about it, so I set aside some time today to rem­edy that.

Just in case, this morn­ing I double-checked. Nope, no sign of a review at the old Funerals & Snakes archive.

Then I thought – on the off-chance – I should prob­ably have a look at the RNZ website.

And sure enough, I reviewed it dur­ing a stint filling in for Simon Morris on At the Movies back in July 2017. But as for what I said, I was still draw­ing a com­plete blank.

I’m pretty sure that I enjoyed it, or I wouldn’t be going down this road in the first place.

I try not to throw any­thing away, so I loc­ated the script for that show – one of the early ones that I did – deep on a hard drive:

It’s 15 years after a vir­us made apes smart and humans mostly dead. The first intel­li­gent ape, Caesar, played as always by the extraordin­ary Andy Serkis, has saved his tribe from a battle with the frightened remains of human civil­isa­tion but he knows they aren’t safe. He’s also bothered by the fact that he broke their only com­mand­ment – ape shall not kill ape – in the last film. There’s a relent­less human col­on­el – Woody Harrelson – on their trail and he’s sent his son to find an escape route to the east, out of the California forests and across the desert.

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Yes, you heard it right, Harrelson’s char­ac­ter is called Kurtz* in hon­our of the shaven-headed Brando char­ac­ter from Apocalypse Now. Harrelson even chan­nels the great Brando in his per­form­ance, swal­low­ing under­played lines and fond­ling his shaven head. I love Woody but this is an imper­son­a­tion not a performance.

On the way to his even­tu­al con­front­a­tion with Kurtz, Caesar meets a former cir­cus chim­pan­zee and com­ic relief called Bad Ape (played by Steve Zahn) and a mute human child they even­tu­ally call Nova (Amiah Miller). It turns out Kurtz has gone rogue and what’s left of the human mil­it­ary can’t stand him either, but they don’t care about the prob­lems of a few scrawny apes. They’re going to bomb the whole place into oblivion.

Kurtz has man­aged to cap­ture Caesar’s tribe and is build­ing bat­tle­ments using the ape slave labour. He’s not going down without a fight (fought by oth­er people and oth­er spe­cies for the most part). But he’s obvi­ously dam­aged goods and the tense face-offs between noble-but-doubtful Caesar and certain-but-bonkers Kurtz are tri­umphant dra­mat­ic moments.

The won­der­ful work that Wētā have done to sup­port the per­form­ances from Serkis and his col­leagues kind of goes with say­ing these days, but I want to espe­cially com­mend New Zealand cine­ma­to­graph­er Michael Seresin who, when he isn’t mak­ing wine and olive oil in Marlborough, has been lend­ing his tal­ent to mak­ing the utterly fant­ast­ic­al seem com­pletely believ­able in films like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the pre­vi­ous Apes movie, Rise.

The forests of British Columbia also do stirl­ing work stand­ing in for Northern California.

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At the end of the film, Caesar leads his flock into the prom­ised land, a land­scape recog­nis­able from the ori­gin­al Heston pic­ture but a con­tin­ent away from the icon­ic Statue of Liberty shot that closed that film – am I the only one bothered by that ridicu­lous geo­graphy? Alright, just me then. He doesn’t have tab­lets with com­mand­ments but Moses should’ve been his name, not Caesar. There’s even a sequence that brings to mind the part­ing of the Red Sea – or at least it did for me.

Director Matt Reeves has pulled off some­thing remark­able here. A giant block­buster that has more to say about the human state – and the state of humans – than most art films. And he pulls no punches. This isn’t our plan­et any more, we’ve giv­en up our rights to it. Whatever hap­pens next, we deserve.

*In that review I had thought that the Harrelson char­ac­ter was actu­ally called Kurtz. Memory play­ing tricks once again.

In the cred­its he’s just known as ‘The Colonel’ but in last night’s re-watch I clearly saw a nametag on his uni­form and it isn’t Kurtz. I made that up all by myself! The rest of the obser­va­tions stand.

I was pleased to remind myself that there were two oth­er good films in that pro­gramme: Timothy Spall and Ian Paisley and Colm Meaney as Martin McGuinness in the Irish ‘troubles’ film The Journey, and an anim­ated epic from France about a child’s jour­ney to the Arctic, Long Way North.

Where to watch War for the Planet of the Apes

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK: Streaming on Disney+

USA: Streaming on Hulu, Max, TNT, TBS, TruTV (I don’t know what half of those are)

Correction

I’ve been asked to point out to New Zealand sub­scribers that the two oth­er Scandinavian films that I men­tioned in yesterday’s news­let­ter, Diana’s Wedding and The Jonsson Gang, are both avail­able to rent on the AroVision plat­form. The over­sight is regretted.

Further reading

I reviewed some new stream­ing fea­ture releases for RNZ yes­ter­day: Bill Nighy coach­ing the English squad for the Homeless World Cup in The Beautiful Game (Netflix), music helps a griev­ing woman time travel in The Greatest Hits (Hulu in the US, Disney+ every­where else), and Anne Hathaway falls for pop star Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You (Prime Video).