The current “Planet of the Apes” series has won widespread praise for its deep simian characterizations, its even more persuasive, performance-captured primate emoting and its robust, overall visual tableaux.

The third movie in the tale of Caesar and his followers’ rise, “War for the Planet of the Apes” (July 14), promises to be even more engrossing and eye-popping.

“We pushed things further,” notes director Matt Reeves, who also made the storm-tossed second entry in the rebooted franchise, 2014’s “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.” “This time, we literally shot in the snow, and one day it was snowing so hard it was ridiculous. And I wanted to use a different format because I felt like this one should almost be like a Sergio Leone or David Lean movie, a big, wide-screen mythic kind of thing. So we shot on 65 mm, used these beautiful, adapted Hasselblad lenses, and the way they render the apes has this great, portraiture quality. And then when you set it on a wider vista, the detail of what we got was just amazing.”

Shot in wintry Western Canada, “War” finds the sentient apes literally at, well, war with the forces of Woody Harrelson’s human general. Raised-by-men Caesar (performance capture wiz Andy Serkis, once again under all that digital fur) goes on a revenge mission after a particularly nasty massacre, his soul as well as his followers’ lives at stake. Caesar picks up a ragtag surrogate family — some animal, some human — along the quest.

Reeves promises complex emotions as well as combat spectacle.

“It’s an epic challenge for Caesar, because he is filled with empathy, and yet the events of the war are so dramatic and the apes are taking so many losses that he starts to, for the first time in the franchise, lose his empathy for humans,” the director explains.

“I have a great love for these characters, and I really do think that this franchise is so unique. You have photo-real, emotive apes who are your main characters, and the spectacle is an excuse to tell a great drama that you couldn’t do otherwise. A lot of other franchises are nothing without explosions and action. This is a war movie, of course we have that kind of spectacle, but really in the forefront it’s about these relationships. I’ve been a huge ‘Planet of the Apes’ fan since I was a child, so to be in this world is something I never would have expected to be doing, and I really see it as an incredible opportunity.”

Lucky guy Reeves was also recently hired to helm “The Batman,” after star Ben Affleck vacated the comic book project’s director’s chair. Reeves claims he’s still too busy putting finishing touches on “War” to know exactly how he’ll be approaching the Dark Knight. But it’s safe to say he’ll be doing it with love.

“It’s a strange thing to be involved in the two franchises which were the two that I was connected to most as a child,” Reeves says. “I just was obsessed with Batman when I was a kid. What I find so interesting about him as a character is that, as far a superhero goes, he’s not superhuman, he is a person. And he is a tortured soul who is grappling with his past and trying to find a way to be in a world that has a lot that’s wrong with it and trying to find a way to reconcile all of that.

“That is a really powerful character, in the same way that Caesar is such a powerful character.”