@Nilitch:
Yeah that's it. But even though in the last movie there was a line like "We're not different (from humans)" (caeser) in the end there is like one stupid monkey if I recall right and one smart human (not much).
A smart human family (the dad lost his first wife to the Simian Flu) and a few other good people, two douchebags who have suffered tragedies due to the Simian Flu, a couple good apes, Caesar's confused son that switches sides twice, many apes that kind of went with whatever the leader did, and Koba (douche ape that was tortured as a regular ape). Is there some sort of character quantity quota we have to meet so that each type of philosophy gets accurately represented? Also, the third movie is said to show apes that are still loyal to Koba's ill fascist perspective on disparaging humans despite Caesar being the leader again.
That quote highlighted how apes can have flaws in their rationality just like humans do. It showed a good perspective that balanced the playing field to emphasize how each side has good and bad individuals. Especially when Caesar became friends with humans in that movie and we see them gradually bonding and working together throughout it. It's easy to take that quote out of context to make it seem like the apes can be just as bad as the ever evil enemy that are humans, but still, context matters.
There are some good themes, but it's not enough, it's like Prometheus in the end, good themes (being cosmic-horror and other stuffs) but… hey. Overall it is still a war movie, and so was the second one. The themes are just there to make it look smarter without digging much. Anyway, what's the difference with the second movie again ? There has been a war, but now it's for real, like the final one and stuff... every humans are really fascists now, but this little girl, that'll probably save the day somehow and the only fascist ape disappeared, now we have an ape with an inferiority complex ->> no, humans are better, we're savage, I'll live with them. (probably gonna be something like that, or I'm forgetting something from the last movie, I don't know.)
But it wasn't just a war film though. There was definitely an action-heavy sequence of a ape vs human BATTLE, but… It was just a battle. That only happened at the two-thirds point in the film for a single sequence (and it was one hell of a sequence that had an epic tank perspective with one consistent camera shot for the final couple or more dozen seconds). Everything else before and after is about basic character interaction (so much to the point that some find the film to have dragged on those moments too much like Robo has said in this thread lol) and hardly any physical combat until the final battle, which is solely between Caesar and Koba. I do not think it's fair to generalize Dawn just because it has physical conflict between species, as if that somehow taints the philosophical messages its exploring rather than amplifying them. By that logic, Rise is also a war film because it has that Golden Gate Bridge battle at the end of the movie between the apes and humans.
The third film is about the final struggle for survival. The battle in Dawn was a curb stomp against the humans and was portrayed in a negative light to showcase how corrupt Koba's perception of humans was and how apes are also capable of carnage. For this war in, well, War, it seems to be going for Caesar becoming desensitized towards being sympathetic towards humans after all of the years of atrocities he's seen only to be subtly reeled back by this human girl his troop decides to adopt. Which sounds like it's a bit run of the mill, I get that. The cynical hardened victim and now oppressor regains their heart because of finding a pure being on the other side who needs their help.
Except what's most likely going to happen, if this film does connect with the original, is the humans lose, Caesar probably dies in a tragic way somehow to show that his crusade for co-existence/peace between the races throughout the trilogy completely failed, and the girl being mute will explain the humans devolving and being forced into war because of the Simian Flu which is indirectly the fault of the apes as well as the humans for not working together (at least from what I can assume).
These movies are most likely going for a Shakespearean tragedy where nobody wins. Or technically at least the characters we sympathize with and support, while all the fascist apes who win the war live and go on to form the devolved unintelligent human slave society millennia later in the first Planet of the Apes. Which would for effective social commentary about not only war, but racism and the need for co-existence like how the original film tied into the social climate of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear warfare by showing how the world ended up after humans blew it all up. That film highlighted the flaws that both apes and humans can succumb to, so it's natural for the reboot to follow in showcasing that. These films are not going to go for some cheesy and cliche happy ending where everybody is united because we just need to talk things out and not judge how the other side looks, like everything up until now was a petty misunderstanding where everybody needed to drink some pepsi to calm down. I can concede that War could easily turn out to be a generic war film for all we know. But Dawn is more than that, even if I do like Rise better.
What then? start a saga with every species vs humans? "bears vs humans" never done before…
To be fair, the whole point of this reboot is to tie-in with the first Planet of the Apes film with a unique modern storytelling focus. So an ape-human war was inevitable. And if a new "humans vs insert advanced sci-fi species here" can have a new execution that makes it stand out from the others like Apes has done so far even if it follows certain familiar tropes, I'll welcome it. Prejudice has been a relevant theme in civilization for, well, ever, and while I hope that it can be diminished as much as possible in the future, it's not going away anytime soon.
The face of a Straw Hat.
