Movie Thoughts: War of the Planet of the Apes (2017)

• Released: June 7th, 2017
  
• Directed by: Matt Reeves
  
• Running time: 2h 20min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

Ceasar and his tribe get kidnapped by a group of vengeful humans, and a war between the apes and people breaks out. Will Caesar and his tribe survive?

My Thoughts

I do genuinely like the Apes movies. This one is yet another strong installment, however I do have to admit that if I had to pick a least favorite of the ones I've seen, it'd have to be this one. It didn't engage me quite as much as the other films. 

I especially didn't much care for the human antagonists this time around. While last movie they weren't too bad (and Koba was the main villain, and a very good one at that), here they just feel kind of blatantly evil. I especially didn't care about the main villain and this whole subplot that the humans are slowly going silent and more animal-like. I watch these movies for the titular apes, not the human drama.

The main aspects that do work about this movie are Caesar's character development and Maurice's relationship with Nova though. The latter is just really sweet as Maurice adopts a human girl, and Caesar really does go through a good arc here, which sadly ends with his heroic death.

Overall I think this is still a pretty strong installment, however if you like these movies more because of the ape characters than the human characters it might be a bit of a letdown that the humans are so incredibly prominent in this one, especially after the second movie struck that perfect human-ape balance. But it also has a lot of good elements.