Sound familiar?
Hollywood has this penchant (Avatar for the most glaringly obvious) of deploying this admirable and wishable dream on the rest of us. The bad guys are bad because they are both tormented and tortured--usually by members of their opposing tribal members. In this case, humans of course have tortured the apes and thus the apes cannot love nor trust humans with good reason, right? We put them in cages and allowed Maybelline and Revlon and Umbrella Corp., and the Military Industrial Complex to torture them for centuries. On the other hand, the Simian Flu that escaped a lab and caused the almost extinction event for humanity caused pain and torture to humans who now cannot love nor trust the apes. Except there is always one guy and one ape that try to rise above all this and learn to love and trust again so everyone can live in peace. Throw in your rogue, hillbilly, ape killers opposing your rogue tortured ape with a revenge fantasy and that's pretty much this whole movie. Why can't we all get along?
There are serious flaws in this movie: Apes and humans have lived for ten years not knowing of each other's existence even though the City compound (SanFrancisco dystopian style) and the ape village are pretty much within sight of each other. Yet, both humans and apes are totally shocked to run into each other in the forest--the humans looking to reach a defunct hydroelectric facility. Along for the ride is the one guy, armed of course, who used to work at the facility. This guy also has a shaky trigger finger and hates apes. Chaos ensues from there, even though the one human and the one ape leader try to make it work. Why does the crazy guy with the gun always have the mystical powers to make the plan work? Why can't he be the guy with the mystical powers who is disarmed? Why is the leader of the humans hell bent on a war "to save humanity" when the other option is just to take a beat and try talking to the apes whose territory humans must cross to get to the hydroelectric plant? Isn't there another route around the apes? How did they know the hydroelectric plant was there, but not the ape village? When the crazy American leader calls in an air strike after making contact with other humans (an air strike, really?) to eradicate the armed ape forces--why doesn't the good guy call off the air strike? Why does every single human hate and despise the apes in the first place? Sure it was a Simian Flu that escaped the lab--but it escaped the lab because of a human--not the hapless apes and monkeys. Were the humans riled up into hating the apes--was that in the other movie? Are there no humans in the City that would say--hey, wait a minute--let's not jump the gun here. Let's ask the apes if we can cross through their territory, do what we need to do at the hydroelectric plant and then we can all live in in peace. Hydroelectric plant? Can one crazy guy with the apparent education and apparent abilities of a Walmart garden area employee get this defunct thing to go again? How is it that the City is so heavily armed ten years after the extinction event in the first place--because "FEMA" left it all behind for them? Where did they go? Why is the human leader suddenly made to
be a crazed, gun toting wild-eyed, war monger, when for the first two hours of the movie he was not? Maybe I missed something by not watching the previous installment of this series? Finally, with an airstrike impending upon the City--the ape leader declares to the human guy who is his friend that they will stay and fight because humans cannot forgive. As far as I can tell, there is still time to call off the airstrike but not enough time to get all the humans and apes out of the city. The crazy leader called down the strike on his own position. Shouldn't both humans and apes be running the hell for the forest? Quite honestly, they're all about to take the hit from the airstrike. If someone, somewhere has the capabilities of making an airstrike called in by unknown persons--why would they--and further, why had they not discovered the City of SanFrancisco by doing fly overs to see if there were any humans left? Huh? How about all that?
The ape CGI and all the industrial light and magic was very well done. The script was lacking. I'm not sorry I saw it--I'm kind of put out that it was so filled with cliches and improbabilities, predictable characters and stereotypical good/bad guys; plot holes and convenient occurrences driving the movie
forward.