The Planet of the Apes Trilogy, and Forging Exciting Sequels
- Glendon Frank
- Mar 16, 2021
- 8 min read
I wrote this up a month ago – I totally didn’t get too busy to post, I was just waiting for the Idea of March. Because Caesar, right? This was intentional. Anyways, reject new theatre releases, return to monke.
In 2011, 20th Century Fox released what was effectively a soft reboot to the Planet of the Apes franchise, through the context of a prequel. While the idea of digging up such a long-dead franchise was met by hesitation from most people, the first movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, made it big. It created a moderate splash and got enough traction that in 2014 and 2017 it was followed up by two sequels, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, making a shocking successful trilogy, and getting points for having the most incomprehensible naming convention this side of The Fast and the Furious. I heard a lot of love for these movies as they were releasing, but I never made it to any of them. I remember seeing trailers and hearing conversations, and they seemed solid enough, but they never quite struck my interest. It seemed like after every movie released, there was a lot of hype – but that hype pretty quickly burned out. After a few years, it looked as if they had left the cultural consciousness entirely.
Time passes, and suddenly it’s 2021. Nearly ten years after the release of Rise. As I’m going through my backlog of blu-rays, I come to this trilogy. Again, I’ve heard good things, but I’m not expecting a whole lot. After all, I have almost no history with this franchise to begin with. But to my surprise, as the movies progressed, I found myself getting more and more invested in these goofy movies. There’s a lot that drew me in, but in particular, I was stunned by the way every single film changed the game top-to-bottom. I’ve written previously about trilogy structure from the perspective of the Original Star Wars trilogy, but Planet of the Apes took a lot of those lessons to their natural conclusion. Me being me, I would be remiss to not give these movies their chance in the sun – especially with a lack of new releases on the horizon.
So, let’s start with Rise, which kind of feels like the trajectory of the entire series in microcosm. It starts as a fun family-friendly adventure flick, with James Franco as a young scientist working with apes, and determined to find a cure for his father’s Alzheimer’s. The solution seems to come in Caesar, a young ape Franco’s character sneaks out of the facility. The first half of the movie essentially consists of a montage as we see Caesar grow up and develop hyper-intelligence, proving himself potent at sign language and complex problem-solving. But with Caesar’s rapid intelligence begins to cause tensions, he is taken to a shelter. While Franco has been the protagonist until now, we slowly transition to the perspective of Caesar as he rallies the apes in the shelter against their abusive wardens. Meanwhile, an updated version of the serum that Caesar received is given to Koba, a bonobo who is clearly framed as Caesar’s more aggressive foil. The clean family-friendly nature of the first half gives way to increasing shades of grey until, in the third act, the movie changes entirely. To spoil one of the biggest pop-culture waves of 2011, Caesar speaks out against his captors, and he, Koba, and the apes all break out. They charge across San Francisco, claiming their freedom in a sequence that shifts the movie into a full-on liberation action piece. The movie entirely transforms, and the end credits take it to another level. Throughout the movie, we’ve realized that this serum is deadly to most humans, and in the credits, we see this serum become a full-on epidemic, spreading throughout the world and affecting billions. A nice, cozy watch for 2021.
Rise is impressive because it’s not only starting a trilogy, but it’s also functioning as a stand-alone prequel. As much as the ending feels like a cliffhanger, it also feels very contained, because the audience generally knows what it’s building towards. We’re familiar with the imagery of the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand, we know this is leading to a world dominated by the apes. And Rise certainly does all the work to get us to that point. It doesn’t rely on the rest of the trilogy to feel like a pretty satisfying prequel. And being a satisfying prequel is a difficult thing to accomplish in its own right, especially when it’s essentially building the distant building blocks of a world already deeply established. Could you imagine if The Phantom Menace stood on its own as a perfect prequel to A New Hope, without requiring two more movies? That almost seems inconceivable. Of course, Star Wars had a sense of surety of success that Planet of the Apes definitely didn’t have as a franchise, but I think it works to Rise’s benefit. It can’t just set up a good trilogy, it has to be a confident and fully coherent movie in its own right. Franco and Caesar are both fleshed-out enough characters that we feel satisfied with the way they’ve grown and changed. It is a lot of fun to watch the pieces of this world fall into place, even with my limited understanding of the original franchise. It works for really any audience member – which is, again, impressive for a prequel. You don’t need to be invested in (checks notes) George Taylor or Cornelius to get invested in this movie like you might for The Phantom Menace. It’s totally accessible and compelling in its own right. And while it could satisfyingly act as a stand-alone, it provides just enough set-up to make a sequel feel rewarding.
I thought Rise was a lot of fun, but it’s Dawn that kicks everything into high gear. In an astounding move, Dawn almost feels like a movie from another franchise entirely. The entire production changes hands – from director Rupert Wyatt to at-the-time relative newcomer Matt Reeves, with a new cinematographer and composer and everything. And, not satisfied, the entire human cast? Gone. Andy Serkis’ legendary performance as Caesar rightfully comes back and takes center-stage. At his side, Koba and the apes from the shelter return, but have their roles radically recontextualized. Moreover, there is a ten-year time skip and the franchise enters an entirely new genre. While Rise largely felt like a family piece with an action bit at the center, Dawn becomes a nigh-Shakespearean drama, appropriately pulling from Julius Caesar. Instead of James Franco, we have Jason Clarke and Keri Russell, and a group of survivors led by Gary Oldman. The stakes reach brand new complexity; the dwindling human survivors turn to Caesar’s growing colony of intelligent apes for help with supplies and power – but many of the humans still see the apes as their inferiors, and Koba begins to grow suspicious that Caesar has more of a heart for humanity than for the apes he’s leading. Tensions rise and loyalties are tested, on every side. It’s less a question of freedom and survival as much as how will we survive? By cooperation, or by violence? Which of those actually makes us human, makes us intelligent?
Dawn blew me away, and considering my love for The Last Jedi, I suppose it should be no surprise. Because just as The Last Jedi challenges and expands on the set-up given from The Force Awakens, every assumption from Rise is problematized in Dawn. In Rise, Caesar and Koba are clear foils, but with little consequence. They simply have different approaches to their freedom. But in Dawn those differences drive the narrative. The relationship Caesar had with James Franco becomes a point of tension as he finds his loyalties divided between his apes and the hope he still has for humanity. Absolutely every element is either taken to a new level or stripped away. If it doesn’t benefit the story of the characters, it’s removed from the equation. What is left, is dialed up to eleven, leading to an absolutely explosive finale. Dawn goes so incredibly hard; I couldn’t help but fall in love. I’m here for any sequel that totally transforms the premise of the original.
And yet, War flips the script yet again.
While Dawn centered Caesar as the main protagonist, War puts a microscope up to him. Another two years pass, and suddenly the political intrigue of Dawn strips away to a character-driven revenge piece. Matt Reeves and his team stick around, but it hardly feels like it because the entire game has changed. Compared to Dawn, the action is far more restrained. I talked a little bit in my Return of the Jedi article about how a third installment generally needs to make a choice between big spectacle or intimate character beats. Doing both is certainly possible, just… rare. In this case, War very explicitly makes the choice to cut away any fat to razor-focus in on Caesar. Fascinatingly, it does this by giving us the most prominent antagonist yet. While the human antagonists in Rise and Dawn are all present, they seem to represent a nebulous perspective of ‘humanity’ rather than feeling like fully embodied entities. In War, however, Woody Harrelson shows up as the General and steals every second he can. He’s actually barely in the movie, but leaves such a deep impression and immediately presents himself as a powerful counter to Caesar. Combined with the lingering presence of Koba from the last movie, the General gives War the sheer pathos needed to bring this trilogy in for a resolution.
While it becomes a deeply personal movie, War also transforms and becomes deeply symbolic. Dawn was Shakespearean, but War is downright Biblical. As the salvific leader of the apes, Caesar becomes a Christ-figure and a chimpanzee Moses. The docile ape from the beginning of Rise is all but unrecognizable now. The Exodus imagery takes the themes of freedom that have been present since that first movie and gives them all the more weight and potency. While the deathly serious nature of War seems a far cry from anything we had in Rise, it also, somehow, feels like the inevitable conclusion. It does bear noting that despite the gravity War possesses, it does bring in new elements that somehow give it the best humour and moments of levity that this trilogy has had yet. Everything feels so perfectly realized. And, in the end, War achieves the same impressive thing that Rise did; it somehow feels entirely satisfying as a prequel, as a stand-alone, and as the conclusion of a very well-constructed trilogy. War makes it all look easy, and while I’m not certain it’s my favourite of the three, it has very much earned its place as one of the few great third installments.
There’s so much to say about how surprisingly great this trilogy is. In focusing on structure, I have barely touched on his genuinely ground-breaking Andy Serkis’ performance is in these movies, and the technology developed to make it work. But I think what awes me the most is the fact that these movies really didn’t need to go as hard as they did. I don’t think anyone was expecting greatness from the prequels to The Planet of the Apes. And while I haven’t looked too much into the production of these movies, it seems clear that there wasn’t an ‘overarching plan’ or anything. Current pop-culture discussion seems convinced that a movie series needs to have every action planned out from the start to tell a tight, compelling story, and yet it would genuinely surprise me if they had War in mind while they were making Rise. It’s not about planning, so much as it’s about good writing – about taking the characters and the world to whatever place they need to go, and then developing them from there. For this trilogy, that process becomes so much about genre. Rise wouldn’t have worked as an intimate character-piece, and War would have flopped as a family-friendly adventure. The trilogy allows itself to totally transform to meet its needs, and I so very much loved watching that process happen. In a time where it’s so easy for franchises to rest in comfortability, The Planet of the Apes trilogy shows how satisfying it can be when the creative team goes all out on every occasion.
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