He is raised outside his race by the man who imprisons his brethren. Enslaved, he stops an overseer from whipping another laborer. This leader guides his nomadic tribe across the desert, where he dies on the border of their forever home. War for the Planet of the Apes finishes a transformation. Caesar (Andy Serkis) becomes Ape Moses. Except Moses never got crucified; that was the other guy. And the plagues of Egypt were pretty boss, but the prophet never pumped a shotgun or outran an avalanche.
Original Planet of the Apes star Charlton Heston was once Hollywood’s Man of God: Moses in The Ten Commandments, John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told, his thirst quenched by Jesus in Ben-Hur. All weird watches now, campy and narcotic, assuming a faith many Americans have abandoned. Apes already mincemeated Heston’s celestial image in 1968. The early installments leaned anti-religious or outright profane. Screenwriter cynics Rod Serling and Paul Dehn twisted Christian conventions: orangutan inquisitors, chimp heretics, Armageddon Mass, Nativity Massacre, Thermonuclear Eden.
When I interviewed director Matt Reeves for a War preview, he noted his own godly cinematic influences. “We watched Biblical epics, because I really felt like the movie had to have a Biblical aspect to it,” he said. “We watched Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments.” A remarkably pleasant man, he also identified The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, and The Outlaw Josey Wales as touchstones. Yet dogmatic vocabulary informed his vision of Caesar’s journey. “The movie is totally about his mythic ascension,” he said. “You can imagine the story of him would inspire religions.”
Only a few months earlier, the director of Kong: Skull Island explained his own rebooted ape in similar divine terms. “How big does this creature need to be,” Jordan Vogt-Roberts told me, “So that when you stand on the ground and you look up at it, the only thing that can go through your mind is: ‘That’s a god.’”
This is not a publication where I overreact to hype-y things directors told me years ago. Note, though, a pious dialect creeping into contemporary big-budget filmmaking, and spot the vast gap in Apes creative instincts. The early films made their Moses a bastard and a world-killer. War finalizes Caesar into a patriarch battle messiah: Moses plus Jesus, if those guys carried their son on their back for days while bleeding to death.
Reeves shoots with tense quietude, so it takes awhile to notice how buck-wild his second outing is. This war movie has western scenery, a prison break, and heavy science-fiction. A plague mutation leaves humans dumb in every way while evolving new talking simians. That’s why the original Planet had smart apes and cave-people, I guess. Trust a prequel for an explanation nobody asked for. War has the franchise’s third Nova (Amiah Miller) but the first named after a Chevy.
The mysterious Colonel (Woody Harrelson) kills half of Caesar’s family. A sordid revenge quest becomes a sacred rescue mission when the Colonel captures the whole ape clan. Imprisoned, Caesar’s put to work erecting a barricade against an incoming attack from other humans. “His wall is madness,” Caesar warns. He’s right. Nothing in the last hour makes sense. Why build a wall against helicopters? Who put the inflammable fuel tank next to the main fortification? Nobody in the army notices the little girl wandering into their stronghold to visit their most important inmate?
Reeves and co-writer Mark Bomback have fun with atmospherics. The human soldiers model screw-you uniform graffiti like “Bedtime for Bonzo.” We see “Ape-Pocalypse Now” scrawled on a tunnel wall. That homage speaks volumes. Francis Ford Coppola also crafted a desolation odyssey toward a Colonel’s doom-cult. Apocalypse Now wasn’t arguing Martin Sheen should start his own utopia. But this was the blockbuster in the 2010s. Hardcore moments from masterworks kept filtering into sequel commercials.
Pull back for a moment, survey the scene. The previous year, Batman v Superman killed the latter. 2017 began with Logan ending rather War-like, the hero self-sacrificing for his next generation’s salvation. That’s what Luke Skywalker does for the Resistance in The Last Jedi, and how James Bond went out years later in No Time to Die.
Various coalitions stump for these projects. A collective argument would be: Frivolous pop culture ideas developed tragic weight, thematic importance, and better violence. I find them all suspicious because I think they just got religious. Fandom’s awe mixed with new confidence in the nobility of escapism and the boring idea that corporate genre entertainment served lofty moral purpose. The results went beyond typical good guy-ism. These icons rose into symbols of righteousness laden with the allegorical language of spiritual reverence. The movies’ dark worlds reveal the main characters as beacons of inspiration. This is even true in Last Jedi, whose main Jedi says the Jedi are bad before using Jedi magic to motivate children into becoming Jedi.
(I am not playing up the religion thing, by the way. Marvel’s two 2017 releases both starred “small g” gods. DC’s big summer hit begins with Wonder Woman learning “the gods created us.” Ridley Scott directed an Alien sequel about Android Lucifer in Space Paradise and produced a Blade Runner sequel about Replicant She-Jesus. On the midbudget level, Darren Aronofsky downshifted from Noah to compress merely the whole Bible into the domestic nightmare of mother!)
Because I love the old-school megadeath Apes endings, and because Roddy McDowall’s Caesar was explicitly called a chimpanzee Jesus, it seems hypocritical to condemn the new dying Christ figures. But the conclusions of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Escape from the Planet of the Apes are shocking because the deaths are pointless. No one gives their life to save the planet. (Quite the opposite!) And Vintage Caesar was a complicated savior whose violent revolution phased into ineffective pacifism. Dehn, the writer who created him, expected he would become a tyrant.
Fatal 2010s blockbusters demanded hope. Sad endings could never be twisted or unsettling. Caesar expires meaningfully, watching his friends frolic in a “new home.” Everyone in Rogue One dies so everyone in Star Wars can live. Death was a brand-builder, shining self-importance onto old sagas. Superman, 007, and Wolverine would all fight again. Resurrection is IP strategy. In last decade’s biggest movie, half the universe comes back to life because Iron Man dies, maybe not for long.
I recognize these movies are beloved. I just went on Screen Drafts, the greatest cinematic podcast, to draft the Planet of the Apes series with Marc Bernardin and Dave Schilling. Since they’re both outstanding pop culture thinkers who enjoy the Serkis trilogy more than me, the episode makes a great listen if you want to hear me receive brilliant verbal smackdowns.
To me, War epitomizes the bad new worshipful tone. So the villain must be the worst, sickest monster. “This is a holy war,” the Colonel tells Caesar. “All of human history has led us to this moment.” In his first scene, he kills Caesar’s wife and older child. Later we learn he executed his own son. The idiot plague infects him, a pathetic fade-out War spoils by allowing him a Walking Dead-ish tough-guy suicide. Then Caesar goes into the desert to find a new hope. That’s precisely what Charlton Heston doesn’t do in Planet of the Apes, and precisely what he does do in The Ten Commandments.
What got lost in the new devotional entertainment? At the risk of being too heavy, I think the answer is democracy. War begins with a sturdy Squad-on-a-Mission plot. Caesar plans to hunt the Colonel by himself. Maurice (Karin Konoval) won’t let him go alone. He’s joined by onetime bully Rocket (Terry Notary) and nice gorilla Luca (Michael Adamthwaite). They also meet Bad Ape (wonderful Steve Zahn), a wackjob snow hermit. The Bridge on the River Kwai model demands internal squabbles, different personalities clashing off-course. That kind of ensemble storytelling is egalitarian, liberated from the dullness of hero worship.
Instead, the team loves Caesar, and he proves the correctness of their adoration. Something propagandistic here, signifiers of hardcore realism attached to a protagonist who’s never really wrong. The only character transformations fluff Caesar’s righteousness. Human soldier Preacher (Gabriel Chavarria) ponders changing sides before wounding the chimp. Traitor gorilla Red (Ty Olsson) kills Preacher to save Caesar, then gets shot in the head. Their whole lives lead up to how they react to Caesar’s ultimate good.
Since there is no ultimate good in the early Apes films, I don’t buy the argument that they’re cheesier than the 2010s trilogy. Cheaper, sure, but expensive CGI decomposes fast. I admire the technical accomplishment of Serkis’ sorrowful War performance while missing his notes of Gollum-y wildness. Imagine if he wasn’t so hamstrung playing a moral paragon. Caesar and the Colonel could be two sides of the same coin: Vengeful dad-commanders pulling the world down to their shared madness. You think the public doesn’t like movies where the obsessed main character might destroy everything? Dude, check Oppenheimer’s grosses.
Previous Planet of the Apes essays:
Planet of the Apes is anti-human from the beginning
Why can’t every sequel be like Beneath the Planet of the Apes?
Escape from the Planet of the Apes invents the franchise’s future in the past
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes burns it all down, again
Battle for the Planet of the Apes is only worth it for the orangutans
In Apes 2001, Tim Burton gets horny for the chimp