Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Saw Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the fifth and final installment of the Planet of the Apes epic. So, this one has its work cut out for it: the last film, in what one can only imagine to be a fit of total obliviousness, cast the apes as black-people stand-ins and ended with the apes triumphantly casting off their human-imposed shackles. However, we know that the apes are destined to rule and the humans are destined to become brutes incapable of speech, so it's going to be tricky to have the underdog finally become the oppressive overdog without playing into the hands of bigots. A coming war against men/white people/straight people is after all exactly what they've been warning us about. So what's a writer to do?

Well, retcon as it turns out. One of the characters makes reference to a many-timelines theory which seems to imply that the oppressive future can be avoided. The subject is then uncomfortably dropped and the apes wage a war against some irradiated humans. I believe the film's writer originally did intend to have the apes conquer the humans outright and tried to figure out how to justify it. In their meditations, they hit upon the much more fraught problem of whether violence is ever justified and it is this they address in this movie.

A lot of war rhetoric is invoked however, which leads to a kind of confusing experience. An evil sub-faction of apes calls for the eradication of the humans, claiming themselves to be "superior" and a "super-race." When the ape-village, which consists of hut-like tree-houses, is bombed, it reminded me of the footage from Vietnam which would have been fresh in the public's mind back then (1973). The irradiated humans and the ape-soldiers lie to their leadership that the other is readying for war. This kind of evokes the cold war for me. There's a lot going on, but in a more evocative than analytical way.

Anyway the film is quite goofy. Really it's more interested in grand, Twilight Zone-esque speeches and in delivering entertaining sci-fi than anything else. The whole anti-war stuff is sort of tacked on and ill thought-out. The dramas of the ape-king's court and the wicked-awesome explosions of the battles account for more screen-time than anything else. The movie is very close to disappearing into its own navel. It's not an impressively shoddy mess, just a regular mess. Forgettable, but not totally regrettable.