In 2017, big studios’ would-be money makers have been crumbling all around us. Presumptive franchise-starters like Power Rangers, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Ghost in the Shell were savaged by critics and given the cold shoulder by audiences. Even the more accomplished releases have lacked depth, consistency and ambition; or more often, a combination of the three. Wonder Woman’s off to a cracking start, but many promising franchises, after a successful maiden voyage, have capsized second time around.



But with this weekend’s premiere of War for the Planet of the Apes, modern blockbusterdom gets its first bona fide success story. And it is, improbably, the one with hyper-intelligent chimps commandeering tanks. Though it may be the neo-Planet of the Apes’ willingness to play such patently absurd material straight that’s made it an exemplar of the reboot trilogy – that standard unit of measurement for studio expenditures – directors Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves (the former handled the first Apes installment Rise; the latter took Dawn and the newly released War) treat their source text with a sort of stony-faced reverence that befits the grave stakes of the primal, grown-up story they’ve set out to tell.

Modern audiences may snigger at Charlton Heston’s cry-to-the-heavens performance, or the goofy simian facial prosthetics, of the 1968 original, but Wyatt and Reeves had no interest in playing the cool teen assuming a stance of ironic detachment from their embarrassing dad. To them, there’s nothing absurd about a chimpanzee in a Panzer; if humans and apes were at war, that would simply be the most logical vehicle for the situation.

The architects of this cinematic coliseum recognized that their structure was sound. The original film won over audiences as an apocalyptic genre picture where damned dirty apes shoved around America’s favorite movie star, but at its essence, it was an elemental myth about the self-sabotaging hubris of man. Wyatt and Reeves retained this idea of faults hardwired into human nature, but in terms of theme and approach, they went wider, dug deeper.

The scripts framed an audacious canvas for this new work, pitting humankind against apes at a species-wide level with battles on the scale of Peter Jackson’s grand scuffles in Middle Earth. A showdown on the Golden Gate bridge in Rise set a bar for action spectacle that a firefight by firelight in Dawn cleared with room to spare. Even when not caught up in the heat of combat, the camera finds snatches of beauty; footage of the apes swinging through their forest stronghold in Dawn has all the grace of a good wuxia film.

Building bridges … Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Everett/Rex

Wyatt and Reeves extended that same sophistication to the narrative, which reckons with the weighty questions posed during the infancy of a new society. The new trilogy frames the conflict between apes and humans as a ready analogue to any dynamic in which a technologically advanced culture encroaches on a smaller but peaceable settlement. For one, humankind’s hostile, imperialist spirit and its contrast with the ape doctrine of nature-worship and pacifism echoes the clash between European pilgrims and Native Americans. If nothing else, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes represents the closest thing we have to a Roland Emmerich remake of Terrence Malick’s The New World, and that’s intended as a compliment. Here, the collision between man and primate assumes a more universal significance, embodying the eternal struggle between the old world and the invasive new.

Wyatt and Reeves spent as much time on the micro-level as the macro-, extending the same well-shaded consideration to individuals that they did to societies. Much of the first Apes film concerns the question of selfhood, and what degree of awareness a creature requires to be treated with the same dignity and respect as a human. (The franchise, which sided with our hirsute ancestors from scene one, answers with a resounding “any”.) Caesar acts as the franchise’s beating heart, a clever and deeply empathetic chimpanzee we watch grow up, only to confront the ugliness of adulthood and life during wartime.

His rise to power and fall from moral grace gave shape to what could have otherwise played out like hollow spectacle, and unprecedented motion-capture techniques empowered Andy Serkis to give a nuanced enough performance to sell the arc. It’s an ideal synthesis of studio-caliber resources and creative aspiration, rendering the impossible all but real through the magic of money and the top-flight equipment it can buy.

The franchise’s unflagging intent on taking itself seriously is the only reason Reeves could ever dream of getting away with the latest installment, which taps into Biblical and Holocaust imagery for one final reckoning. Despite introducing an irritating new character doomed to go down as this franchise’s Jar Jar Binks, Reeves ventures into the darkest and most mature territory yet with War. He tackles all of the franchise’s pet themes at running speed: the sanctity of life, the utility of mercy v productive violence, the fraught process of sculpting society from chaos. Reeves considers the reality of war – its casualties, its compromises – with such solemnity that subtitling the upcoming Avengers picture Infinity War feels like a distasteful faux pas.

It’s a suitable cap to a series that’s always bitten off more than it could chew, and then managed to swallow it all down anyway. The Apes trilogy sets an inspiring example for the unwashed reboot masses, daring to plumb grim depths but then backing it up with thoughtfulness and compassion. To the simple layman, it merely appears that Reeves is trying harder. If this studio-mandated remounting of tired old intellectual property propped up by a massive budget can have sincere emotions and a sense of visual competence and ideas, real live ideas, then what excuse do the Transformers have?