War for the Planet of the Apes is a 2017 science fiction epic from writer and director Matt Reeves.

I had heard in 2017 that War for the Planet of the Apes was one of the best science fiction films of all time. At that time, I was all into the online / YouTube film reviewer scene. I watched people like Chris Stuckman and Jeremy Jahns every Friday to see what movies were coming out and how good they were. War was supposed to be a slower, but character-driven successor to the greatness that was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. (You can read my review of that here.)

I’d honestly had War on my list for years. I’ve been so looking forward to it that I watched Dawn, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (the first in the trilogy once I had access to it—read my review here), and finally War for the Planet of the Apes. I prepared myself to be blown away.

I was, by Dawn. Dawn was one of my favorite movies I’ve seen for a long time. I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed Rise much more than I thought I would.

But… War? War was very disappointing.

A Synopsis of the Disappointing Finale

Spoilers for the whole trilogy.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a desperate man experimenting to find a cure for Alzheimers created a drug that developed two ways. It created a disease that wiped out the vast majority of the human population. That same disease caused massive genetic advancements in brain activity for apes. Caesar, the trial in the experiment, along with Koba, the second trial, became the leaders of the new tribe of evolved apes in the Muir Woods.

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (confusing, we know), ten years pass. The new tribe of apes came into contact with a human settlement hold up in a few buildings in San Francisco. Caesar and human peace-leaning leader Malcolm navigate relationships between the two groups. Koba schemes to usurp Caesar while Dreyfus, the military leader of the humans, tries to defend the humans from possible attack. The war breaks out when Koba attempts to kill Caesar and invades the human colony. Caesar prevails against Koba, but the human colony makes contact with some military leftovers that now declare all-out war on the apes.

War for the Planet of the Apes takes place three years later. The war with the Colonel, as this military pocket is called, grinds away. He has recruited apes loyal to Koba serve as “donkeys,” pack mules and munitions carriers. Caesar’s son Blue Eyes thinks he’s found a way over the mountains and across the desert to a new home for the apes away from humans. However, the Colonel locates Caesar through a gorilla that betrays the apes. The Colonel mistakes Caesar’s wife and son for Caesar, and he kills them both.

The movie’s first half is Caesar’s quest for revenge. With Maurice, and Rocket, his orangutan and chimpanzee companions from all the way back in the first movie, along with Luca, a gorilla from the second movie, Caesar makes his way across the war-torn country side. The Colonel’s encampment is on the move toward the California border to fight another military cell. On the way, Caesar runs into a girl who cannot speak and an ape who can speak from a different zoo, named Bad Ape. Finally catching up to the colonel, Caesar is caught after attempting to break into the military complex on his own but the tailing Luca is killed anyways.

The second half is a prison breakout movie. The imprisoned apes are building a massive military complex because a rival faction of soldiers are trying to kill the Colonel and his religious zealots. Caesar tries to negotiate basic food and water with the religion and history obsessed Colonel. Caesar is beaten and strung on an X-shaped cross, a Donkey Gorilla hating him the most. The Colonel reveals to Caesar that the original disease has mutated, leading to humans that can’t speak and seem to lose higher functioning. The Colonel had to kill his own son, leading to his extremism. All apes must be humiliated and die.

When the mute girl sneaks in and comforts Caesar, Caesar figures out an escape plan with Maurice and Rocket. They smuggle the apes out of the camp using conveniently placed tunnels. During the escape, the enemy army attacks, giving Caesar an opportunity to sneak in and attempt to kill the Colonel. However, the Colonel himself has gotten the disease: he is unable to speak. Caesar, on the verge of killing him, chooses not to and instead injures himself while blowing up the prison camp. After a convenient avalanche destroys both armies, Caesar and his tribe arrive in what appears to be the Rocky Mountains. He dies there from his wounds, seeing his people in a Promised Land, free and at home.

The Disappointment

This finale is disappointing for many reasons.

The good out of the way: Yes, the special effects are absolutely spectacular, especially the snow on the animated apes’ hair. Yes, the performance from Andy Serkis is phenomenal. Yes, it has several spine-tingling moments. Yes, it contains many references to other great movies, including Apocalypse Now and the other Planet of the Apes movies.

But this isn’t a good movie. References, performances, and special effects do not a good movie make. The writings does. And this writing is full of problems.

They all have to do with, “The Go-To Guru’s Official Reasons Why Finales in Trilogies are Often Bad.”

1) The Repeat Problem

2) The Theme Problem

3) The Caricature Problem

The repeat problem is that often, finales in a trilogy just repeat the previous movie(s) in some way or another. An example of this would be Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, where the filmmakers decided to make a new Death Star to fight and blow up for that movie.

Here, Maurice the Orangutan finds and befriends the mute girl. He advocates for her when Caesar does not want to care for her. But… we already had this with Maurice in the second movie. He befriended peacekeeping Malcom’s son and then helped both Caesar and Caesar’s son Blue Eyes like the humans again. Why is both Maurice and Caesar going through that again?

Also, the finale of this movie is a prison break. But… we already had a prison break in the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And that one was much more unique because it was from inside a primate center with apes who were getting more and more intelligent and were able to surprise their captors.

But here, they just manage to… escape with convenient tunnels, and convenient avalanche and convenient cables where prison guards don’t somehow see them escaping even though they’re right there in the open light.

That’s the repeat problem on display here. We’re just repeating situations in slightly different ways from the first and second movie.

Then, there’s the theme problem. Similar to the repeat problem, this is when the finale or sequel says the same thing or even says less than the original did. An example is Kung Fu Panda 3, where Po finds the same inner peace and spiritual enlightenment he found when making peace with the loss of his mother and the adoption of his father. But then, he finds it from his father who he’s rediscovered. Same arc, same parenthood theme, just simpler and far less subtle than the Kung Fu Panda 2.

The theme of this movie is that revenge is dehumanizing. The Colonel isn’t even human anymore for his rage on the apes and their disease. He dehumanizes diseased humans even though they, like the mute girl, clearly show intelligence. Caesar almost becomes less than human as he kills the Colonel in cold blood. He worries he’ll become like Koba, killing other apes and killing humans.

All of that was played out in the first and second films. Granted, it is the strongest part of this movie, especially Caesar’s face as he holds the gun to the Colonel’s head. The effects and performance there are spectacular. And you can revise and expand a theme as it plays out over multiple movies, shows, books, whatever. But the theme generally feels like a regression. The “dehumanizing of humans” was already played much more subtly in Dawn.

Take, for example, Dreyfus, the military counterpart to peacekeeping Malcolm. He will kill himself just for the chance of harming the apes in a rage. He will do anything to save humanity, but in the process has perhaps lost something of his own. He’s a better, more understandable version of the Colonel. And you understand the humans and their perspective, while the Colonel just lead as faceless army that seems to follow him without question whereas the humans in Dawn felt much… more… human. All of the subtly and nuances of the previous films are gone.

While the performances are subtle in this movie, especially Andy Serkis as Caesar, the actual story isn’t subtle at all. It takes the same theme and actually takes it a step back. Yes, Caesar leaves the Colonel to die. But that’s actually far less nuanced than Caesar choosing to let Koba, who attempted to kill him and his friends and his son, drop to his death. We played out the revenge bit, in a movie just as long as this, in less time, far more impactfully overall. Again, the movie repeats itself and the theme regresses. It doesn’t have much new to say.

Final, and we’ve been getting into it, there’s the Caricature problem. This is that a finale or sequel will often take the characters of the previous and make “caricatures” of them, or take their most well-known characteristics and remove all of the subtleties. This is what happens in How To Train Your Dragon 2, where the friends of Hiccup literally repeat the same jokes and quips and character traits that they grew out of or learned to appreciate in the first movie.

The characters have become caricatures of themselves. While it’s slightly different, the mad and crazy humans who kill and hate the apes are simplified versions of all the subtleties of the second movie. There, desperate humans did desperate things, but there were always factions and multiple perspectives and levels of motivation. Here, the Colonel didn’t bother figuring out if the humans who got sick… were… intelligent? Contagious? If every human means something now, why kill of those if they were sick? If that’s your MO, how did you get EVERY SINGLE soldier to buy into that? How come we see not a single one disagree, like the second movie did? That’s an entire “side” that’s become a caricature.

In addition, Blue Eyes’ story arc and involvement has totally flattened so he doesn’t advocate peace with the humans or shows the leadership skills he learned from the second film. He’s just the hopeful one who’s used as revenge fuel for Caesar. Koba’s apes, who followed him due to fear but respected Caesar but hated humans but worried about fellow apes, now just hate Caesar and work with humans because they hate Caesar. The apes are made purely defenseless in the prison camp and as they escape, like shooting fish in a barrel, when there have always been innocents and combatants on both sides. Apes are almost pure victim, while humans are almost pure villain. The characters or groups of characters are leeched of their compelling or multidimensional traits and used for a new singular purpose that’s far less complex in this story.

Finally, there are your run-of-the-mill plotting problems. How did they conveniently escape from the prison camp? Why on earth, if the Colonel believes even any close contact with the apes might get you sick, did he leave any alive at all? Why did that avalanche conveniently come? How did the military just so happen to run into all of the apes when they’re heading north but the apes seemed to be heading east? Why did all of the enemy soldiers charge straight down this narrow alley when they have tanks and artillery weapons that can fire from long distances? Why did the soldiers never explore their tunnels, especially after an ape snuck into camp? Why does Caesar die from fatal-looking wounds at the exact moment they make it to the supposed Promised Land, after weeks or maybe months of traveling? Scene after scene contains huge plotting problems that really break the cause and effect of this story.

One last thing. There’s a naming problem with this movie. The second movie Dawn has much, much more war in it than War of the Planet of the Apes does. In fact, War has the least action of any of the three movies. That doesn’t really matter, but when the second movie contains what’s often considered one of the greatest science fiction action shots of all time, it does sets the bar quite high.

This movie isn’t a good sequel. It’s not a good movie, even, with so many decisions that don’t make sense.

This is so disappointing, from something I heard was the one of the best movies ever made.

A Sad Failure

This movie is not good. It has a lot of moments that are good in isolation. The special effects are spectacular. But the “Go To Guru Sequel Problems” plus its own problems just as a movie make this not good. It’s a shame, after being moved by Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, that I spent most of this movie questioning the actions characters make and the conveniences of the plot.

I was disappointed. I was sad. But at least I still have the other two amazing movies.