'WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES'..........ROUND UP THE USUAL SIMIANS.........

War For The Planet Of The Apes (2017)     A tough one to deal with........

            We can't fault the filmmaking here. It's superb. Top notch. The height of professionalism and dedication to craft.

             We also cannot escape a cold, hard fact,,,,,,can't avoid it.

              This movie's a miserable experience to sit through.......a dark, glum, gloomy, we're-all-gonna-die-sooner-or-later doubled-down downer.......

             As much as we admired the motion-capture acting, the writing, directing, camerawork.......the overall effect was like getting our teeth cleaned for two and a half hours.......

             In 1968, like everybody else, we got a huge kick out of the first Apes movie. Nobody had seen anything like it before.....it played like a feature length "Twilight Zone" episode, with a script co-written by the TZ maestro himself, Rod Serling........complete with the mother of all TZ twists in the last 10 seconds........(who can ever forget Charlton Heston screaming "Damn you all to hell!")

             What a high wire act that film was......a daring blend of action-adventure, sci-fi and sardonic, dystopian satire.......perfectly scored with eerie dissonance by Jerry Goldsmith....

             The four subsequent sequels, each one progressively cheaper and tackier, left us cold with their overall depressing, downbeat view of humanity and the future.......but to be fair, all sci-fi cinema held this worldview until Lucas and Spielberg brightened things up a bit with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters"........

               So the "Apes" movies never held any nostalgic place in our heart......and that certainly included Tim Burton's misbegotten,  convoluted, upside-down-and-backwards remake of the original film....

               And we were never any big fans of the new millennium trilogy of Ape movies that "War For The Planet Of The Apes" wraps up.....("Rise Of....." and "Dawn Of.....")......more foolish humans, more abused apes......only now with state-of-the-art digital splendor....whoopie.

             The only thing that kept us awake through this one was the whole "Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now" homage.....with Woody Harrelson doing a fully engaged version of Colonel Kurtz,....the kind of performance that Francis Coppola must have originally envisioned for "Apocalypse Now" instead of the one he ended up with from the bloated, bored, ever-distracted Marlon Brando......

                We'll leave it at this.........a few days ago, the whole world collectively went "awwwww" watching news footage of a mother gorilla cradling and kissing her newborn baby......

                 We extracted more drama, pathos and hope for a brighter future in that 20 seconds of footage than the entire running time of the last 8 Apes movies......2 stars (**) for "War For The Planet Of The Apes".......admire them all you want.......as for us, in the immortal words of movie mogul Sam Goldwyn.....include us out.