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Three-Sentence Movie Review
My middle son, in the still-dark theater as the credits rolled after two hours and twenty minutes of War of 
the Planet of the Apes:
Wow. It’s like a group of screenwriters made a really stupid bet. “Who can write a movie that will make an audience boo humans and cheer monkeys?”
See? I’m not the only curmudgeon in the family.
Published in General
Also, the movie violates my “Woody Harrelson” rule. Any movie with Woody Harrelson in it is not to be watched. He is the leader of the nihilistic progressive post-modern anti-western civilization and anti-human life brigade.
In the same way as it’s possible to read a book, sure. Normal people can read A.S. Byatt’s Possession or The Code of the Woosters without thinking much about politics. Fewer people remain apolitical in their reading of The Handmaid’s Tale or The Fountainhead.
When I say “normal” people, I give the game away, though. If you were a socialist in the mid-century, when Wodehouse was at his peak, you wouldn’t be able to see his books as apolitical; Code of the Woosters portrays Nazis as being similar to the socialists Wodehouse writes about elsewhere (recall that Wodehouse was an active propagandist for Hitler’s regime during the War). There’s all sorts of delegitimizing of socialist positions and normalizing and romanticizing of hierarchy.
You and I aren’t all that far from Wodehouse’s values, so they don’t seem too prominent. When we read stuff by ardent commies, though, we’re more likely to notice and less likely to be immersed as a result.
We don’t need films to be absolutely on the same page as us but it becomes noticeable when either the position is absurdly extreme, as is apparently the case with the Apes, or when it’s explicit. I love Agents of Shield, for instance, but the use of the line “nevertheless, she persisted” to refer to resistance to a Nazi regime, along with lots of “alternative facts”/ “fake news” and other buzzwords meant that an apolitical reading of the show would involve willful blindness.
I feel like this rule is overinclusive with regard to White Men Can’t Jump.
I never read the book, didn’t even know about it until recently. It’s certainly different from the movies, but not in a good way, I expect. It’s written by a Frenchman so I assume it’s pretty heavy on some foolish ideas.
But I do like the original movie with Charlton Heston. In that movie, the human wins. Of course, there’s an apocalyptic warning about blowing up the world, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. As we have developed tremendous weapons, we should always be reminded how dangerous they are.
“Planet of the Apes” with Charlton Heston is one of my favorite movies. I like how Taylor outsmarts the apes.
Nope. Not going to watch it.
In other news the reviews for Dunkirk are amazing.
Its the only movie I intend to watch in Imax this summer.
I was rooting for the iceberg in James Cameron’s Titanic. Like the iceberg my eyes’ were glazing over watching this saga with two featured characters as shallow as the North Atlantic is deep. The pristine iceberg symbolized salvation from over two hours of bum-numbing tedium, and more importantly no sequel.
Doug,
Excellent review!! So much time saved in unnecessary viewing distress. This is a true public service.
Regards,
Jim
It might be the only movie I see this summer “period”. I was hoping they wouldn’t blow it and it sounds like they haven’t*.
*Subject to change after I see it, obviously.
I do the same thing with movies that involve submarines, nuclear power, the Navy, or science and engineering in general. My girls have rolled their eyes so many times, it’s a miracle they aren’t stuck looking inward . . .
Before you make a statement like that you really should read the book. As far as I know it was written in English. I don’t remember it being a translation. The author’s name is French, that doesn’t make him an idiot. It was well written, fun to read, and involving, enough so, that havint read it more than 40 years ago, I still remember much of it.
from Wikipedia and consistent with what I learned on the extras on the DVD: “La Planète des Singes, known in English as Planet of the Apes and Monkey Planet, is a 1963 science fiction novel by French author Pierre Boulle. It was adapted into the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, launching the Planet of the Apes media franchise.”
I’m bothered to by the “humans [western imperialists] are the bad guys and need to be defeated by the other” narrative that crops up so frequently in films, but I’m still looking forward to watching “War for the Planet of the Apes.” I enjoyed the two preceding films, which I thought were more nuanced in their depiction of the relations between the humans and the sentient apes than I had initially feared. “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” I thought, did a great job of making many of the humans just as sympathetic as the apes, and the ultimate antagonist of that movie was the war-mongering ape Koba.
I think an important thing to keep in mind with regards to the storyline of these films is that humanity is being decimated primarily not by apes but by a virus the humans created (a virus that was not intended to be harmful). The overall tone of the first two films with regards to the humans felt more to me like lamentable tragedy and not “Haha! Yes! Die, humans, die!”
I really liked Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It was a great movie. I just watched War and it was just okay. Once again, the second movie in the series is the best. After the last movie, I think this movie had a lot of potential, but didn’t fully realize it, which is too bad.
Maybe this is my human bias, (I identify as a human) but couldn’t humans be the good guys?
You’re showing your privilege.