Anghus Houvouras on War for the Planet of the Apes…
There are some things that defy explanation. Like how the Great Pyramids of Giza were built, what happened to the settlers at Roanoke, or why people watch The Big Bang Theory. Sometimes there are no answers.
The question of why a movie succeeds or fails is rarely a mystery. There are few features in 2017 whose soaring success or flaming failure I would label ‘surprising’. When looking over the big hits and massive disappointments of 2017, there are very clearly defined winners and losers. People are still buying whatever Disney is selling, audiences haven’t yet tired of seeing the cast of the Fast and Furious franchise yell at each other while driving and Universal’s Dark Universe was just a terrible, terrible idea.
I suppose the poor box office in the United States of Transformers: The Last Knight was something of a surprise. Though the movie still managed to make nearly $600 million thanks to a worldwide audience who hasn’t yet tired of Michael Bay’s incomprehensible, nonsensical mind fucks.
Scanning the list of cinematic losers doesn’t exactly produce a lot of gasps. Was anyone expecting Ghost in the Shell, The Dark Tower, or Baywatch to do well based on their sub-par marketing? To be fair to the respective marketing departments of those studios, they didn’t have a lot to work with. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Rings and The House were weapons grade stinkers just about everybody saw coming.
There’s one film on the list that I do find genuinely surprising. A film that falls squarely in the disappointments column. The third film in a successful franchise that managed to garner both respect from critics and a healthy box office build. And even though the third installment was well reviewed it has lagged at the box office, crawling towards a total that would leave nearly $350 million dollars on the table. It’s a series that has been both innovative and entertaining. And yet, the well reviewed, unconventional third lost a significant share of the audience.
War for the Planet of the Apes
It’s always difficult to figure out why a film doesn’t resonate. Why were audiences fine with the first four terrible Transformers movies but decided that a fifth terrible Transformers movie was the saturation point?
If I had to pin the failure of the film on any one thing, it would probably be the creative direction of the series. The first two Apes films in this new series navigated deftly between the human characters and the apes. We learned about Caesar (Andy Serkis) and watched him grow into the hero of the series, but audiences still had human tethers to ground the drama. War for the Planet of the Apes took a bold step by ditching good and decent human characters. A distinct line was drawn between the besieged Apes and the war-hungry human element desperate to end the plague that has driven humanity to the brink of extinction. I’m not sure if the film needed a marquee name for an Ape-friendly character, but I’m guessing the movie might have performed better if there was some human element fighting on the side of the Ape-angels. And, no, the little mute girl doesn’t count.
For their bold choices, Matt Reeves and Fox were met with ambivalence. Apparently audiences weren’t ready for a movie where all the heroes were simians. So much of their communication relied on sign language and subtitles. And we know how mainstream American movie audiences feel about subtitles.
I loved the direction the franchise took with War, but its further descent into darkness was apparently a little too deep for summer movie ticket buyers looking for two hours of distraction. It sucks that a film that took so many risks and deviated from the typical franchise formula was punished for their bold choices. War for the Planet of the Apes was challenging, unconventional, dark and original. But since the main character was an Ape without a human character/movie star to serve as the protagonist, audiences kind of didn’t care.
Anghus Houvouras
Originally published August 17, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
