Max Lloyd-Jones

War for the Planet of the Apes is a 2017 American science fiction action film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by Dylan Clark, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and written by Mark Bomback and Reeves. A sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), it is the third film in the Planet of the Apes reboot series, and the ninth film in the Planet of the Apes film series. The film stars Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson and Steve Zahn, and follows a confrontation between the apes, led by Caesar, and the humans for control of Earth, while Caesar himself exacts revenge for the murder of his family. Like its predecessor, its premise shares several similarities to the fifth film in the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), but it is not a direct remake.

War for the Planet of the Apes premiered in New York City on July 10, 2017, and was theatrically released in the United States on July 14, 2017, by 20th Century Fox. The film was a commercial success having grossed over $490 million. It received critical acclaim, with many reviewers highlighting the performances (particularly Serkis'), visual effects, story, direction, cinematography, musical score and emotional depth. The film received a nomination for Best Special Visual Effects at the 71st British Academy Film Awards, and was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 90th Academy Awards. It was also nominated for four Saturn Awards, including Best Director for Reeves and Best Actor for Serkis.

In 2028, two years after the bonobo Koba attacked the human survivors in San Francisco, Caesar and his tribe of intelligent apes have been forced to fight against a rogue U.S. military faction known as Alpha-Omega led by a ruthless colonel. Alpha-Omega employs other apes, derogatorily called "donkeys".

An Alpha-Omega platoon launches an attack on an ape outpost, but it fails and four soldiers, including one named Preacher and a "donkey" gorilla named Red, are captured. Caesar releases the humans, hoping to show the Colonel that the apes are not savages; Red escapes by injuring the albino gorilla Winter.

Caesar's eldest son Blue Eyes and lieutenant Rocket return from a long journey. Blue Eyes reports that they found a place, across a desert, that is ideal for the apes. Despite an uneasy Winter asserting that the apes should leave immediately, Caesar decides they need to prepare first. That night, the Colonel leads a team in infiltrating the apes' home, killing Blue Eyes and Caesar's wife Cornelia. The apes are unable to find Winter, who they believe betrayed them to the Colonel.

As the tribe gathers to journey to safety, Caesar leaves his youngest son, Cornelius, in the care of Blue Eyes' wife Lake, then departs to serve as a decoy for the others. Accompanied by Rocket, orangutan Maurice, and gorilla Luca, they enter a desolate village, where they find a soldier. After Caesar kills him in self-defense, they find a mute girl, who Maurice befriends, giving her a rag doll.

They find Winter, now a "donkey", at an Alpha-Omega camp. Winter says that the Colonel has left, then attempts to call out for help, but the other apes restrain Winter and accidentally suffocate him. While following the Alpha-Omega force, the apes discover soldiers shot and left for dead. Their examination of a dying soldier reveals that he is mute like the girl.

Caesar's group chase a hooded figure who stole one of their horses and are surprised to discover he is an intelligent ape named Bad Ape. Bad Ape knows where Alpha-Omega is stationed and leads them there. The location proves to be a heavily fortified quarantine facility in the mountains. Attempting to get a closer look, Luca is killed by some soldiers and Caesar is captured. Caesar learns that Alpha-Omega captured his entire tribe and are forcing them to build a defensive wall. The Colonel forces him to work with the other apes, but Caesar inspires them to stop working.

Caesar deduces that the Colonel is barricading the facility to fend off the remaining U.S. Army, who are against him for going rogue. The Colonel explains that the Simian Flu virus has mutated and the human carriers subsequently become mute and devolve. He has Caesar tortured with starvation to force the other apes to work. The mute girl, named Nova by Maurice, sneaks into the facility to give Caesar food, water and her rag doll. To divert attention from Nova, Rocket allows himself to be captured and beaten by Red. The next day, the Colonel discovers and confiscates the doll.

Caesar and Rocket successfully free the apes via an underground tunnel leading out of the facility. Caesar remains behind to confront the Colonel, but the facility is attacked by the Army. Finding the Colonel infected by the virus from contact with Nova's doll, Caesar watches him commit suicide.

The escaping apes are caught in the crossfire between Alpha-Omega and the Army. Caesar attempts to blow up a large fuel tank to take out the Alpha-Omega forces from behind, but he is shot by Preacher. Red intervenes with a change of heart, killing Preacher, but is immediately killed by another soldier. Caesar blows up the tank, inadvertently triggering an avalanche that completely wipes out both Alpha-Omega and the Army. The apes, carrying Nova, survive by climbing nearby trees.

The apes cross the Colorado Plateau and reach the oasis Blue Eyes had reported. While the other apes celebrate, Maurice discovers Caesar's fatal wound. He promises to tell Cornelius who his father was and what he did for the apes, moments before Caesar dies.

• Andy Serkis as Caesar, a chimpanzee who is leader to a tribe of enhanced apes.
• Woody Harrelson as Colonel J. Wesley McCullough, the leader of the paramilitary organization the Alpha-Omega, who is obsessed with wiping out Caesar and his tribe to preserve humans as the dominant species on Earth.
• Steve Zahn as Bad Ape.
• Toby Kebbell as Koba, a treacherous bonobo.
• Gabriel Chavarria as Preacher, a crossbowman working under the Colonel in the Alpha-Omega.
• Judy Greer as Cornelia.
• Karin Konoval as Maurice, a Bornean orangutan and Caesar's loyal adviser and friend.
• Terry Notary as Rocket, Caesar's loyal lieutenant.
• Michael Adamthwaite as Luca, a western lowland gorilla in Caesar's tribe.
• Ty Olsson as Red.
• Devyn Dalton as Cornelius.
• Sara Canning as Lake.
• Aleks Paunovic as Winter.
• Amiah Miller as Nova, a mute orphan girl whom Maurice befriends and cares for.
• Max Lloyd-Jones as Blue Eyes.

Development

After seeing his cut of Dawn, 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment signed Matt Reeves to return as director for a third installment of the reboot series. In January 2014, the studio announced the third film, with Reeves returning to direct and co-write along with Bomback, and Peter Chernin, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver serving as producers. During an interview in mid-November 2014 with MTV, Andy Serkis said they did not know the next film's setting. "...It could be five years after the event. It could be the night after the events of where we left Dawn." In May 2015, the title was first given as War of the Planet of the Apes. By October 2015, it had been retitled as War for the Planet of the Apes.

When director Reeves and screenwriter Bomback came on board to helm Dawn, the film already had a release date, which led to an accelerated production schedule. However, with the third installment, Fox wanted to give the duo plenty of time to write and make the film. Taking advantage of this, the two bonded with each other more than before.

In interviews for Dawn, Reeves talked about the inevitable war Caesar would have with the humans: "As this story continues, we know that war is not avoided by the end of Dawn. That is going to take us into the world of what he is grappling with. Where he is going to be thrust into circumstances that he never, ever wanted to deal with, and was hoping he could avoid. And now he is right in the middle of it. The things that happen in that story test him in huge ways, in the ways in which his relationship with Koba haunts him deeply. It's going to be an epic story. I think you've probably read that I sort of described it where in the first film was very much about his rise from humble beginnings to being a revolutionary. The second movie was about having to rise to the challenge of being a great leader in the most difficult of times. This is going to be the story that is going to cement his status as a seminal figure in ape history, and sort of leads to an almost biblical status. He is going to become like a mythic ape figure, like Moses."

Toby Kebbell, who portrayed Koba in Dawn, had expressed interest in reprising his role or performing as other characters. Plans to include Koba in a larger role in the film were abandoned early, with Bomback saying, "If you stayed until the very end of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you hear Koba's breathing. We did that to give us a tiny crack of a possibility that we could revive Koba if we wanted to. Very early on in spitballing, we realized there was nothing more to do with Koba—certainly nothing that would exceed what he had done in the last story. But we knew we wanted to keep him alive as an idea. In playing out the reality of what happened at the end of the last film, Caesar would be traumatized by having to kill his brother. That would have resonance, and we wanted to make sure that did not get lost. So the answer was that we could go inside Caesar's mind at this point and revisit Koba that way."

Casting

In August 2015, Deadline reported that Gabriel Chavarria had been cast as one of the humans in the film. In September 2015, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Woody Harrelson had been cast as the film's antagonist, and that Chavarria's role was supporting. In October 2015, TheWrap reported that Steve Zahn was cast as a new ape in the film. It was also announced that actress Amiah Miller was cast as one of the film's humans, with Judy Greer and Karin Konoval reprising their roles as Cornelia and Maurice, while Aleks Paunovic and Sara Canning were cast as new apes.

Filming

Principal photography on the film began on October 14, 2015 in the Lower Mainland in Vancouver, under the working title Hidden Fortress. Filming was expected to take place there until early March 2016. Parts of the film were expected to shoot for up to five days in the Kananaskis in late January and early February. In March, Serkis confirmed that he had finished shooting his portions.

Visual effects

As with Rise and Dawn, the visual effects for War were created by Weta Digital; the apes were created with a mixture of motion-capture and CGI key-frame animation, as they were performed in motion-capture technology and animated in CGI.

At New York Comic-Con 2016, Reeves explained that he and Bomback were influenced by many films before writing. He said, "One of the first things that Mark and I did because we had just finished Dawn was that we decided to watch a million movies. We decided to do what people fantasize what Hollywood screenwriters get to do but no one actually does. We got Fox to give us a theater and we watched movie after movie. We watched every Planet of the Apes movie, war movies, westerns, Empire Strikes Back... We just thought, 'We have to pretend we have all the time in the world,' even though we had limited time. We got really inspired." According to Reeves, the treacherous apes being nicknamed "donkeys" is both a reference to the video game character Donkey Kong and the fact that they are used as "pack mules".

Additionally, during production, Reeves and Bomback sought broader inspirations from films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. Feeling that there was a need to imbue Biblical themes and elements, they also watched Biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. The influences and inspirations were made evident in the relationship between Caesar and Woody Harrelson's Colonel, a military leader with pretensions toward godhood. Reeves has compared their relationship to the dynamic between Alec Guinness's British Commander and Sessue Hayakawa's prison camp Colonel in Bridge on the River Kwai. Another comparison is in Caesar's journey to find the Colonel, flanked by a posse of close friends—a situation Reeves explicitly tied to Clint Eastwood's war-weary soldier in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Influences from the film Apocalypse Now, notably Harrelson's character and his Alpha-Omega faction being similar to Colonel Kurtz's renegade army, were also noted by several journalists. Harrelson has also acknowledged the similarities and inspiration.

On October 17, 2015, it was confirmed that Michael Giacchino, the composer and writer of the soundtrack for Dawn, would return to compose War's score. The soundtrack was digitally released to iTunes and Amazon on July 7, 2017, and in its physical form by Sony Masterworks on July 21, 2017.

The film was initially set for a July 29, 2016, release. However, in January 2015, Fox postponed the film's release date to about a year later on July 14, 2017.

Marketing

Special behind-the-scenes footage for the film was aired on TV on November 22, 2015, as part of a contest announcement presented by director Matt Reeves and Andy Serkis. The footage aired during The Walking Dead on AMC. The announcement allowed winners to wear a performance-capture suit and appear in a scene as an ape. The announcement was released on 20th Century Fox's official YouTube page later the same day.

At a New York Comic Con special event on October 6, Reeves, Serkis and producer Dylan Clark debuted an exclusive look at the film.

Serkis has also mentioned that the film would be accompanied by a video game, for which he performed motion capture. Titled Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, the game was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in fall 2017.

Box office

War for the Planet of the Apes grossed $146.9 million in the United States and Canada and $343.8 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $490.7 million, against a production budget of $150 million.

In North America, the film was projected to gross $50–60 million in its opening weekend; however, given its acclaimed status and strong word-of-mouth, rival studios believed the film had the potential to debut as high as $70–80 million. War was closely monitored by analysts while the summer was witnessing a decline in ticket sales, a situation that they blamed on franchise fatigue for an overabundance of sequels and reboots (such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Transformers: The Last Knight and The Mummy). However, box office analysts noted that well-reviewed films have tended to perform in-line with estimates (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man: Homecoming). The film grossed $5 million from Thursday night previews at 3,021 theaters, up 22% from the $4.1 million earned by its predecessor, and $22.1 million on its first day. It went on to debut to $56.3 million, topping the box office, albeit with a 22% drop from Dawn's $72.6 million debut. In its second weekend, the film grossed $20.9 million (a drop of 62.9%, more than the 50.1% fall Dawn saw), finishing 4th at the box office. In its third weekend, the film made $10.5 million (dropping another 49.9%), finishing 6th at the box office. It was lower than the third weeks of both Rise ($16.1 million) and Dawn ($16.8 million).

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 94% approval rating based on 355 reviews, with an average rating of 8.20/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "War for the Planet of the Apes combines breathtaking special effects and a powerful, poignant narrative to conclude this rebooted trilogy on a powerful—and truly blockbuster—note." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 82 out of 100 based on 50 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

War for the Planet of the Apes received praise for the cast's performances (particularly Serkis'), Reeves' direction, visual effects, musical score, cinematography and its morally complex storyline. Scott Collura of IGN awarded the film a score of 9.5 out of 10, saying: "War for the Planet of the Apes is an excellent closing act to this rebooted trilogy, but also one that does enough world-building that the series can potentially continue from here—and it's a rare case where, after three movies, we're left wanting more." A. O. Scott of The New York Times said of the film, "War for the Planet of the Apes, directed by Matt Reeves, is the grimmest episode so far, and also the strongest, a superb example—rare in this era of sloppily constructed, commercially hedged cinematic universes—of clear thinking wedded to inventive technique in popular filmmaking," and lauded Andy Serkis's performance in the film, stating that "Andy Serkis's performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, and said that Serkis performed "with a resonant power and depth of feeling that's nearly Shakespearean. Oscar, get busy: Serkis deserves the gold," and went on to say that "War for the Planet of the Apes—No. 9 in the simian cinema canon—is the best of the Apes films since the 1968 original." Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave the film a B+ rating, and praised Matt Reeves's directing, saying "It's a given that an expensive 21st-century sci-fi movie with talking animals, exploding tanks, and jarring machine guns would look and sound great, but Reeves applies these effects with such a measured strategy that they're always working in service of a greater narrative agenda." Kohn went on to applaud the visuals and musical score, stating that "The breathlessly paced montage of flying bullets and angry monkeys raining down on terrified men, aided by Michael Giacchino's vibrant score, is a strong indicator of the next-level craftsmanship that distinguishes these movies from so many cacophonous Hollywood spectacles; not only is the action easy to follow, but you care for the motion-captured characters at the center of it, while the humans cower in fear."

Home media

War for the Planet of the Apes was released on Digital HD on October 10, 2017, and on Blu-ray and DVD on October 24, 2017 by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Accolades

According to screenwriter Rick Jaffa, a version of the spaceship from the 1968 Planet of the Apes under the name Icarus was in Rise of the Planet of the Apes as a deliberate hint to a possible sequel re-adapting the events of the original film, something the end of War also implies, featuring a younger version of the character Nova. During an interview of Andy Serkis with MTV in mid-November 2014, Serkis talked about possible sequels: "It might be three films, It could be four. It could be five. Who knows? The journey will continue." By October 2016, it was reported that a fourth Planet of the Apes film was being discussed. Shortly before the release of War in July 2017, Reeves said that he expressed interest in making more Apes films and that Steve Zahn, who played Bad Ape in the film, had set up a story for further sequels. Writer Mark Bomback hinted that more films would be possible, saying, "Truthfully, we haven't had those kinds of conversations. I've been working on these films for about seven years now. I'm ready to take a breather and let things rest a bit." In April 2019, following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney, Disney announced that future Planet of the Apes films are in development. It was also confirmed in August 2019 that any future installments would take place in the same universe first established in Rise.

On December 3, 2019, it was reported that Wes Ball is currently set to write and direct an untitled Planet of the Apes film. On February 17, 2020, it was reported that the film will be produced by Joe Hartwick Jr. and David Starke. Later that same day, Ball confirmed that he would be directing the film, and that it would be set after the events of War, following "Caesar's legacy". On May 26, 2020, Ball revealed that Josh Friedman will write the screenplay, while Jaffa and Silver will return as producers. He also said that, while the film will be set in the same universe as Rise, the film won't be a direct sequel to War, saying that the film "will feel" like a follow-up to the overall Rise trilogy, but at the same time, the filmmakers will "do some really cool new stuff" for the film. Ball also said that the film could begin virtual production soon in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic due to it being a mostly CGI film.