BELATED REVIEW OF WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

Have These Apes Reached Their Long Goodbye? YEAR: 2017

The good old days of the original PLANET OF THE APES, as that franchise ended with a BATTLE instead of WAR at the head of its title, things weren't so good — the budget got lower with each installment so the climax was... well... very anticlimactic... 

And now, as far as money goes, sky's the limit, and WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, while looking terrific with tons of special effects, has hardly anything to do with the title wherein BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES simply lacked the necessary ingredients for it to matter...

WARScore: **

This WAR is a gritty rehash of the first and worst of the new APE trilogy, which was also an 11th hour prison escape flick. Herein the second half takes place with the apes caged by those god-awful humans, either crazy military types or silent, primitive idiots caused by the Simian Virus that's wiped out most of mankind. And, based on the trailers, Woody Harrelson seems to be the formidable leader of the human renegades; and he is, technically...

Pretty bad, but it had a story

But what's written in graffiti on an underground (escape) tunnel is more than just more pop culture: In the very beginning, one of the soldiers has BEDTIME FOR BONZO written on his helmet. And so... the spray-painted words, APOCALYPSE NOW, not only fits the military's dire situation, but that's pretty much exactly where things wind up as Woody's baldness serves an actual purpose. "The horror... The horror..."

By the time the two enemies face off, our hero ape, Caesar, had spent a long and pointless rudimentary hour searching the flatlands for clues to where the bad Colonel's fortress is (Colonel Kurtz, get it?), only to be thrown in a cage where the actor behind the CGI, Andy Serkis, wears the same old angry-for-vengeance expression, only this time bathed in searing and repetitive melodrama befitting a misleading epic score: like RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and unlike the best of the three, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, this is a two-hour movie that, while sporadically nice to look at and loaded with some cool last-minute action and explosions, could have been replaced by a simple narration introducing an actual story that has a beginning, middle, and the only thing this WAR is about — a long, dragged out end.