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- how similar the two species really are.
Laughs Bomback, "It's that sort of crazy
mirror that Planet of the Apes does, where
it's an ape discovering how animal he is.
It's the reverse of what a normal storyline
would be of a human in a wartime situation
discovering how base he can be. This is
an ape that thinks himself more elevated
than humans, realizing that the worst
parts of him are these human parts that
he's inherited." According to Bomback,
War manages to take this idea to the next
level: examining the legend of Caesar and
how that eventually becomes the myth of
Caesar, positioning him as a kind of Moses
figure for ape society.
"Any time we talk about the film, we
point out that it's called Planet of the
Apes.," Bomback explains. "It's not a
mystery that apes will ultimately inherit
the Earth. The reason this is called War is
not simply that Caesar is at war with the
humans, but there is war going on within
Caesar. And the question is, what is Caesar
capable of allowing himself to do in the
service of protecting his people? How much
darkness is Caesar willing to allow into his
own heart in order to attain for his people
the victory that they need?"
"It's really a war for Caesar's heart and
his soul," Reeves emphasizes. "In Dawn
he had a blindspot, which is he was both
human and ape in that he was raised
by humans, and he was an ape, yet he
was also an outsider to both of those
communities. That made him the perfect
bridge to peace. He had seen compassion
and decency and empathy from humans,
even though he's also seen a really terrible
side of humanity. Koba had never seen that,
which also meant that Caesar didn't have
a total understanding of Koba's situation;
that there was never a way that Koba could
have imagined living among humans after
he was treated the way that he had been
by them."
This war within Caesar comes down to
how much he's willing to forgive humans
due to his unique history with them, and
to what extent he's willing to break from
them permanently. "It was important that
we took Caesar to a new place and to new
extremes," Reeves points out. "We had to
push him to the place where he would start
30
ISSUE 01
■ COLONEL
CHAOS: The
Colonel (top, in
sunglasses) with
a gorilla lieutenant; Director Matt
Reeves (in white)
on the set.
to lose the empathy that he has, and then
make this a story about him fighting to hold
onto his soul, to maintain his humanity.
That's the test of the movie. It ends up
becoming a battle of wills between him and
The Colonel. What he experiences in that
battle results in him trying to find some way
to maintain empathy."
In a sense, Caesar's struggle connects
him more to The Colonel than either might
initially expect. Bomback says, "They are,
in a sense, confronting the same challenge,
which is, what are you willing to sacrifice
within yourself in order to preserve your
species? And The Colonel is not nefarious.
He believes with as much certainty as
Caesar believes that he is the one person
that can deliver his people. In a sense, he's
the best human character we've created,
because in some ways he is a very, very
particular foil for Caesar."
For his part, Serkis praises the film's ability
to balance the viewpoints so as not to pass
judgment on either character. "It's done in
such a way that you can make up your own
mind," he says. "It forces you to enter your
own moral maze as to which side you wish
to follow, or if you indeed end up following
either side. Everyone is trying to survive, so
it's an equal playing field in many ways. It's
certainly not that this is about apes beating
up the humans or vice versa. Everyone's in it
together, in a way, in a desperate situation."
Reeves compares Harrelson's character
to Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, or its source
material, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:
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