2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes surprised almost everyone. Its teaser trailer, which showed James Franco unconvincingly saying things like, “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DEALING WITH,” to other scientists, was easy to ridicule, and the very idea that Hollywood would reboot such a campy series was offensive to anyone who’d ever had an original idea in their lives.
But guess what? It was good. And it made buckets of money. The sequel, 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, was even better. It also managed to be one of the bleakest portraits of humanity that I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood blockbuster—an uncomfortably dreary look into a world where humans keep doing the wrong things (interesting!), made all the more depressing with the knowledge that the story would end with them losing.
War For the Planet of the Apes looks to continue the franchise’s trend of increasing the quality of each subsequent film while providing a more pessimistic outlook on the state of the world, and I can’t wait to shuffle into a dark theater, curl into a ball on my seat, rest my head in my hands, and listen as frighteningly egotistical humans try and fail to maintain control of their planet.
