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The third instalment of the Apes franchise, with its no-nonsense title that promises straight-for-the-jugular action movie violence, is a more thoughtful film than you might expect.
It sits in that war movie tradition stretching from Objective, Burma! to The Hobbit, focusing on a small group of characters on a journey deep into enemy territory while a broader conflict rages around them.
In this case, the war is between the paranoid, shell-shocked fragments of human civilisation left standing after a devastating virus and a growing community of technologically challenged but highly evolved apes, led by the wise and compassionate leader Caesar (portrayed by Andy Serkis in simian CGI drag).
In the opening, Caesar's folk are on the back foot, hunkering down in their jungle hideaway.
But when human soldiers raid the camp, leaving scores dead, he decides that the best mode of defence is attack, and sets out to confront the humans and their talismanic leader, The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), a shaven-headed psycho framed in shadow like Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz.
You don't need to look to hard to realise the film's depiction of asymmetrical warfare resonates with current day conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria, nor to identify a critique of American militarism in the film's sympathy for the apes' point of view.
The cruelty of the humans is confronting, and the bodies of dead apes left in piles after the first bloody battle is an unexpectedly harrowing detail that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) carefully places in frame.
You wonder if a Hollywood film about a contemporary war would have the courage to show similar carnage.
But the power of this opening battle scene — with its impressive gunfights in pitch black tunnels illuminated by laser sights and flashes of orange from the high-powered weapons — gets increasingly dispersed over generic plot beats.
The film starts as a journey through the wastelands left by the retreating humans, with a couple of unlikely characters along for the ride — then transforms into a kind of prison movie, with Caesar and his band confronting The Colonel in his fortified compound.
The parallel with real world issues is obvious — The Colonel and his men are even building a giant wall using slave apes — but nothing seems quite as startling as the film intends.
Even when Harrelson gets to externalise his warped plans in the obligatory evil villain monologue, the most memorable detail Reeves and his screenwriter Mark Bomback offer up is their antagonist eating an apple with a hunting knife.
Compare this to the year's other Apocalypse Now-inspired ape movie, the feverishly inventive Kong Skull Island, and the problem seems obvious.
The current Planet of the Apes franchise is just so insufferably earnest, with a po-faced quality seldom seen outside of Biblical movies. In fact, that association becomes inescapable when apes actually appear on crucifixes towards the end.
The impressive realism that transposes Serkis's considerable acting range to a computer-generated monkey mask, meanwhile, is almost a distraction.
You can't help wondering what a love scene might look like or how the ape latrines would work, yet anything so visceral or banal remains sidelined by the constraints of the heroic journey.
When I first started reviewing these new Apes films, I wondered what would happen if someone like Michael Bay directed one.
The idea of hiring a director infamous for overblown spectacle might seem like sacrilege to the many fans of the new franchise, but I like to think what a filmmaker with more bombast might do with this material.
In the meantime, we've got this serious, and often self-serious new film. A well-mannered, well-made war.
Topics: action, director, unrest-conflict-and-war, animation, united-states