I am hoping beyond hope that WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES knocks it out of the park in a big way, and if these early reactions from the first screenings of the Matt Reeves film are any indication, my wish may very well be granted. Of course, we've been down the road of overly positive early reactions before, so we probably shouldn't jump aboard the "everything is awesome" bandwagon just yet. Still, if WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is actually able to improve even further on what came before, we should be in for quite the treat.
We're still about a month out from the official release of WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, but I've got my fingers crossed, and just about everything else, that Matt Reeves and company have been able to pull it off. We really don't need another threequel that drops the ball. Please be amazing.
If nothing else, we should expect the film to look appropriately grand. WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES director Matt Reeves recently told Empire that he wanted the film to "be like a Biblical epic." Reeves added that co-writer Mark Bomback and himself looked at classic war movies like THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, PATTON and APOCALYPSE NOW, but they were "also thinking in terms of things such as The Ten Commandments. I wanted it to feel very intimate in the foreground, but with grand vistas always dwarfing [the characters]. In a sense it’s about these two species pitted against each other and nature being greater than both of them. I wanted a David Lean ape movie."
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES will hit theaters on July 14, 2017.
