The balls Apes doesn't have

My favorite moment in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, now clearly the standout of this trilogy, is when Koba plays into the stereotype of being an ape. He "monkeys around." He "acts the fool." He makes ooo-ooo-ooo ah-ah-ah noises.

And then he takes a machine gun and caps the humans who have so underestimated him.

That moment has balls. It's unafraid to show a species with disdain for another species that has subjugated it for so long. It's abrupt and nasty and wonderful.

Where are those balls in War for the Planet of the Apes?

Nowhere. The same place as the war itself is: Nowhere.

I finally caught up with this movie Thursday night, as I use this last week before I go on vacation to tie up any loose ends from the summer viewing season, the last month or so of which was truncated first by my wife's trip to America, then by the advent of MIFF. As you recall from yesterday's post, it was Valerian on Wednesday night; on Thursday, finally Apes.

I might have waited for video with the amount of rousing big-screen action this movie was set to give me, or more appropriately, not give me.

I wouldn't have ordinarily minded a summer blockbuster that kind of deconstructs our expectations for a blockbuster, but this movie has the word "war" right there in its title.

Not "battle." Not "skirmish." Not "brouhaha." Not "donnybrook."

War.

And the word "war" sets up certain expectations. You expect not only one battle, but many, with loads of indiscriminate death and bodies strewn across battlefields. You expect a knock-down, grind-out confrontation that ends in the utter decimation of one of the sides. And because you are familiar with the history of this nearly 50-year-old franchise, you know the decimated side is supposed to be the humans.

But my goodness if this film didn't get skittish about the idea of apes wiping humans off the map.

It's the outcome we knew was coming all the way back in 1968, when Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes fried our noodle with that big ending, where we realize that lo and behold, this damn place is Earth. The humans were not dead and gone, not totally, but they were an endangered species forced into slavery. It's not something we've had any illusions about in the half-century since then. (And incidentally, why not delay War of the Planet of the Apes one more year and just release it on the 50th anniversary of the first film?)

But the studio got squeamish. It didn't back away from the idea of humans approaching extinction, because that still happens, if only for the sake of continuity. Instead, it bent over backwards to make the new conquering overlords as sensitive and humanistic as possible. (Though since humans are often portrayed pretty negatively in these films, "apenistic" might be a better term for the moral disposition I'm describing here.) In fact, these apes are damn near overburdened with a nearly fatal dose of gentility and grace.

I wanted to see them rise up and make a conscious choice to become the dominant species on the planet. I didn't want to see them nice their way into supremacy.

And just because they rise up and kill their enemy does not mean we can't still sympathize with them and love them. Good people -- er, good creatures -- are forced to do bad things if their enemies give them no choice. But instead of being pushed to the brink and unleashing hell, these apes are the equivalent of the Disney hero, who never kills the villain -- the villain dies as a result of being too aggressive in his attempts to kill the hero. In fact, many times, the hero makes a vain attempt to save the villain before the villain plunges to his death.

Rather than crushing him under his boot, which I wanted these apes to do.

It would be like George Lucas coming to the end of Revenge of the Sith and saying "You know what? Maybe Annakin Skywalker doesn't kill all the young jedis in training." Nope. Can't do that. He already did.

I can't even enumerate the moments of gooey sentimentality devoted to just how enlightened these apes are. The movie pauses maybe two dozen times to linger on their benevolence and kindness. The score swells, a tear rolls down an ape cheek, a flower is tucked behind the ear of a small mute girl they take as their charge. These are not killing machines. They are hippies.

Where is damn Koba?

Dead, of course. Koba and his worldview were squelched in the second film when Caesar's rival and philosophical opposite was dropped from one of those great heights that kills every Disney villain. There's no Koba stand-in in this movie. Except, of course, for Koba himself, who appears once or twice as a vision to Caesar.

This movie needed some damn Koba. It needed some disdain for human beings, who are presented in almost ludicrously monstrous fashion as embodied by Woody Harrelson's merciless colonel. It's a problem that we don't see a single human being in this film who is not a soldier (okay, one -- the girl). I do like the better balance of following the human story and the ape story that we are given in Dawn, but the real problem is not that the humans are cardboard caricatures of villains. The problem is that the movie doesn't use that status as license to let the apes indulge their primal urge to protect themselves and become the alpha species. With what they've been through, we wouldn't even blame them.

Yet they spend all their time caressing the faces of and sticking flowers in the hair of mute girls.

Get some fucking balls, War for the Planet of the Apes.

And we're talking about a whole planet here, right? Maybe the apes who overthrew the humans in France or Nigeria or China or Brazil weren't a bunch of pussies.