It is January 2016. On an expanse of waste ground not far from Vancouver airport lies a chilling and spectacular sight: a sprawling labour camp, larger than a football stadium, where gun towers and searchlights are silhouetted against the white winter sky. Brutalist bullet-pocked buildings are daubed with slogans: Keep Fear to Yourself, Share Courage With Others; Fight Weakness Or Perish; Give Everything. The imposing concrete structure is patched here and there with wood, corrugated iron, barbed wire and fences. A stony-faced soldier plods through the grime and snow on horseback, a rifle slung over his shoulder, as the rain turns puddles into muddy lagoons.
This is not the most auspicious setting for a summer blockbuster. But then the Planet of the Apes movies don’t really do levity. This rebooted series, which began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 and got even murkier three years later with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, is darker than the typical franchise. For the third instalment, War for the Planet of the Apes, its director, Matt Reeves, cites Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Hidden Fortress as influences and throws in references to Apocalypse Now; the producer, Dylan Clark, mentions 28 Days Later as a touchstone. Special-effects extravaganzas the Apes films may be, with their innovative use of performance-capture technology. But ephemeral and escapist they most definitely are not. “We don’t look at the Middle East; we don’t look at the Bible; we aren’t making polemics,” says Clark. “But if we are doing our jobs right then the films should reflect what people are experiencing today, especially our leaders.”
The sombre approach has struck a chord. The Apes films are not only the best-reviewed blockbusters of recent years, they also take serious money – superhero money. Rise, which cost $93m to make, grossed $480m internationally, beating Thor and Captain America. Dawn, with nearly twice the budget, took $710m, putting it neck-and-neck with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
When the 1960s/70s series was revived six years ago, the chances of success seemed remote. The 1968 Planet of the Apes was a schlocky yet well-regarded fantasy made timeless by one of the great twist endings in cinema. Four lacklustre sequels, followed by two television spin-off series, amounted to flogging a dead ape, and the franchise finally fizzled out in the mid-70s. “Those movies got progressively worse,” says Clark. The situation was not helped by Tim Burton’s listless 2001 remake. In that context, a new Apes cycle was anything but a safe bet. Right before the release of Rise, its star, James Franco, even expressed concerns that the picture’s reception would be adversely affected by his presence. “Critics will be out to kill this movie and blame me for it just because they are out to kill me,” he said.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, though, had shown that a more sober approach was not necessarily box office poison. With Nolan’s trilogy already winding down (The Dark Knight Rises opened a year after Rise), there was a gap opening up in the market for another serious-minded origin story. “We didn’t deliberately set out to do on Rise what Nolan had done,” says Clark. “But once we started shooting, it was, like, ‘Oh, wait, this is our equivalent of Batman Begins …’”
Though Rise was a hit, it still felt torn between its philosophical musings and its obligations as a wham-bam action movie. Its director, Rupert Wyatt, stepped down from directing Dawn after disagreements with the studio, and Clark brought in Reeves, who had made Cloverfield and Let Me In. “Matt said: ‘I want to take these apes, put them in their own environment and shoot them on a long lens so it looks real.’” Clark and Reeves were also in agreement about severing ties to the old Apes movies. “There were some echoes and references in Rise to the earlier films. [The] folks at the studios liked it, but for me there was one too many. We were grappling with how to get the balance right and, when Matt came on board, we set out to make something for this generation.” Reeves maintains that the current Apes films are still part of the same universe, and as such are leading inexorably towards the events of the 1968 original: “We know the end of the story, which is a great gift because then it stops being about what happens and becomes instead about how. It allows us to work through the chapters of what I like to call our Russian ape novel.”
War for the Planet of the Apes is, as the title suggests, a full-blown combat movie, with a gruelling PoW story thrown in for good measure. Andy Serkis returns as chimpanzee Caesar, the hero of the franchise, who finds himself in a secret labour camp where apes are being abused by a shaven-headed tyrant known only as the Colonel. “I’ve played Caesar from [his] infancy,” Serkis says between takes, “so it’s a bit like Boyhood. I’m picking up his life as he goes along, rather than playing the same character each time. He was brought up among humans so I always thought of him as a human in an ape’s skin. For this one, I studied world leaders at the beginnings and the ends of their reigns to see how their expressions changed; how their physicality gets broken down. I see Caesar as a reflective, Mandela figure – but now it’s all taking its toll on him.”
“The war in this film is between humans and apes,” says Clark. “But the real war is going on inside Caesar. At the end of Dawn, he broke one of his own tenets – ‘Ape shall not kill ape.’ The question is whether he can regain his humanity. He might be an ape but he’s the most human character in this place.”
Reeves calls “action” on a scene in which Caesar intervenes in the whipping of a prisoner, prompting insurrection among the other apes. “Leave him!” Serkis cries in take after take, his voice ringing out chillingly across the camp. Like all the actors playing apes, he is dressed top-to-toe in a grey performance-capture jumpsuit studded with reflective markers that resemble blue nipples. These enable the wizards at Weta, the New Zealand digital effects outfit that made its name with the Lord of the Rings movies, to track and digitally interpret an actor’s every twitch. Serkis is also sporting a bicycle helmet, from which a metallic arm mounted with a tiny camera extends, shooting him in constant close-up. A smattering of white dots on his face and lips, which will aid computer-animated detail, suggests a severe case of correction-fluid chickenpox.
“I’ll cut the whole film together first without any special effects because they’re so costly,” says Reeves. “That version is Planet of the Dot-Men. It has to work on its own terms with the performances before we think about the digital rendering.” Woody Harrelson, who plays the Colonel, seems amused by the whole process. “When they’re all wearing the dots on their faces, that takes a day or two to get used to,” he chuckles. “It’s so wild and weird.”
Harrelson has his own theories about why these rather grave films have managed to connect with large audiences. “It’s important that the story is believable. With some of these sci-fi things, there’s just no way they could ever happen. But it’s amazing how emotional this is. You really care about Caesar and his family.” Clark thinks the secret lies in the classicism of the storytelling. “We can be The Godfather, dramatically speaking. If you were to go out and remake The Godfather, people would say: ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ But if you do it with apes instead, it can work.”
It is 18 months later when I catch up with Reeves in London. The film is finished and it’s a knockout: dramatically uncompromising, visually ravishing and with an air of grim finality (though the director confirms there will be more episodes, which he hopes to be involved in). Especially striking is the prescience of the film in both its detail – the Colonel is overseeing construction of a wall to separate apes from humans – and its infernal tone. “When we wrote it three years ago, the wall for us was this mythic thing from a biblical epic. Obviously now it relates strongly to current events. Hopefully there’s a timelessness to the themes.
“We’re looking at how the extremes of war can warp you and create a struggle where it becomes harder to empathise with others. The film comments, as all war films do, on the flawed aspects of our nature that make us feel we’re not connected – that we can destroy each other.”
Harrelson agrees that War is a film for its time. “It has a certain apocalyptic mood that seems to fit with what’s going on today in the world,” he says now. “There’s a reason we’re pulling for the apes when we watch it: the humans are out of control, man!”
War for the Planet of the Apes is released on 11 July
