A Problem from Hell
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) dir. Matt Reeves deals with genocide. How did history factor into the movie?
Matt Reeves's filmography is a movie-themed bingo card at your college’s bingo night: vampires! David Schwimmer! College dramas! A giant Manhattan-consuming monster!
Apes and foreign affairs!
That is a bingo space one does not expect to fill, yet somehow, a plastic token ends up covering it. War for the Planet of the Apes fills the space using a combination of Weta Digital and real-life events.
After the events of Reeves’ predecessor Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Cesar (Andy Serkis) and his army find themselves in the crosshairs of military faction Alpha-Omega, led by a colonel (Woody Harrelson) with an iron fist. The colonel traps the apes in an abusive, gulag-like camp.
Reeves and Mark Bomback’s screenplay embraces this mere synopsis to leave the viewer questioning the who, what, where, and why of world history.
Candles
Still recuperating from Koba’s attack on the human survivors of San Francisco, Caesar discovers that his empathy for the humans is misleading. After the colonel kills his eldest son and wife, Caesar sets out on a revenge mission. His empathy later returns in the form of sparing the colonel, albeit the latter - infected by the mutated Simian flu - still shoots himself. While some question how Caesar can still retain his empathetic nature after the apes’ ordeal, it is not unprecedented in world history.
Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian Jew born in 1934. One can fill in the blank.
With her parents, two older siblings, and twin sister Miriam, they were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Eva and Miriam were quickly subjected to Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments until the camp’s liberation.
In the documentary Forgiving Dr. Mengele, Eva detailed the torture Mengele put the twins through: on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Nazi doctors would lock the sets of twins in a room naked for hours before measuring their body parts. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, Eva was routinely injected with unknown substances.
After one set of injections, Eva developed a significantly high fever, swollen limbs, and blotchy red spots throughout her body. Despite fading in and out of consciousness, Eva’s perseverance allowed her to recover from her illness; a few weeks later, she was liberated by Allied forces.
In 1984, she and Miriam founded CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - a nonprofit focused on educating about the largest genocide in world history. Until her death in 2019, Eva told her story many times, including to Buzzfeed in 2017:
Throughout her later life, she did something controversial among her fellow survivors: she forgave Mengele. Many criticized her misplaced empathy, yet Eva felt power in taking back the worst moment of her life.
This is not the only time Caesar’s character arc is influenced by real-life stories.
Inaction
Halfway through War for the Planet of the Apes, Caesar deduces that the U.S. Military is against Alpha-Omega for going rogue. This results in the colonel forcing the imprisoned apes to build a defensive barrier around Alpha-Omega’s facility. While the U.S. Military is determined to thwart the primitive threat, would the Military condone Alpha-Omega’s conditions? One has to wonder, “If the military was against Alpha-Omega, why wouldn’t they do anything to stop the torturous and inhumane facility?”
The answer can easily be attributed to American history.
Former United Nations Ambassador and current United States Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power wrote about America’s complicity surrounding genocide in her Pulitzer-Prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
An excerpt from Ambassador Power’s book reads:
Contrary to any assumption I may have harbored while I [worked as a war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia], the Bush and Clinton administrations’ response to atrocities in Bosnia were consistent with prior American responses to genocide. Early warnings of massive bloodshed proliferated. The spewing of inflammatory propaganda esclated. The massacres and deportations started. U.S. policymakers struggled to wrap their minds around the horrors. Refugee stories and press reports of atrocities became too numerous to deny. Few Americans at home pressed for intervention. A hopeful but passive and ultimately deadly American waiting gme commenced. And genocide proceeded unimpeded by U.S. action and often emboldened by U.S. inaction.
Power found that several factors contributed to U.S. complicity surrounding genocide, including but not limited to:
“Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil.”
“American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference.”
“The U.S. government not only abstains from sending its troops, but it takes very few steps along a continuum of intervention to deter genocide.”
“U.S. officials spin themselves (as well as the American public) about the nature of the violence in question and the likely impact of an American intervention. They render the bloodshed two-sided and inevitable, not genocidal. They insist that any proposed U.S. response will be futile. Indeed, it may even do more harm than good, bringing perverse consequences to the victims and jeopardizing other precious American moral or strategic interests.”
In the Planet of the Apes universe, the U.S. military sees the genocide of apes as an inevitability - a price that humans are willing to pay in exchange for world peace.
Throughout the movie, however, the opportunity cost for humans becomes more evident.
A Leader
Amidst an uprising from the militaristic humans, Caesar leads his apes through arguably the conflict’s darkest hours.
One can easily see a Paul Rusesabagina-style leadership in Caesar.
Rusesabagina was a hotel manager in Rwanda who suddenly found himself caught in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Hutu Rusesabagina and his family were in a vulnerable position; his wife, Tatiana, was Tutsi, and his children were considered to be mixed. During the genocide, Rusesabagina managed to save over 1,200 Hutu and Tutsi refugees alike through his hotel.
In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, four out of eight of Rusesabagina’s siblings were still alive. He later wrote in his autobiography An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography, “for a Rwandan family, this is a comparatively lucky outcome.”
Caesar’s tribe of apes also experienced a comparatively lucky outcome. After the movie’s bloodshed during the climax, the apes reside in the Colorado Plateau - an oasis ape Blue Eyes originally reported. Amidst the water and the forest, everything is calm despite Caesar succumbing to his wounds.
Conclusion
There is a reason why War for the Planet of the Apes is considered to be one of the best movies in the Planet of the Apes franchise. Reeves’s direction and screenplay embrace the plot’s dark subject matter to tell an eerily familiar story.
Behind the computer-generated imagery and riveting performances, a warning for world history is present. To this day, genocide is a current epidemic in Xinjiang and (potentially) Ukraine). It’s not going away anytime soon.
Maybe, it is time to address it beyond cinema.