After the rise and the dawn, the apes are going to war. Before director Matt Reeves presents his threequel War for the Planet of the Apes at this year’s New York Comic-Con, 20th Century Fox just released the synopsis for the upcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes sequel.
What can we expect from performance-capture actor Andy Serkis’s anti-hero ape Caesar and his angry band of uber-intelligent primates this time around? Well, it looks like things are going to get hectic for just about everyone. Here’s the synopsis:
In War for the Planet of the Apes, the third chapter of the critically acclaimed blockbuster franchise, Caesar and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless Colonel. After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind. As the journey finally brings them face to face, Caesar and the Colonel are pitted against each other in an epic battle that will determine the fate of both their species and the future of the planet.
The rebooted prequel series has teased an epic humans-vs-apes standoff in the past. There was that killer Golden Gate Bridge sequence from director Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 franchise restarter Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and then the apes had to contend with Gary Oldman’s flawed human semi-villain before Caesar had to take matters into his own hands to fight evil ape Koba in Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
But now it seems like everything before that was just a battle, and this is the war.
The Colonel in the synopsis will be played by Woody Harrelson, who’s the right kind of actor to turn on the sadistic craziness when he needs to. Match that with Serkis’s character wrestling with “his darker instincts” and it’ll make for a seriously awesome and thought-provoking clash of cultures in the middle of the CGI spectacle.
For his part, Reeves seems game to link this entry to the older incarnations of the Apes saga. He recently tweeted out an image of what will probably turn out to be a CGI ape on horseback, which is reminiscent of the 1968 original starring Charlton Heston.
War for Planet of the Apes is scheduled to hit theaters on July 14, 2017. Besides Serkis, the movie also stars Steve Zahn, Terry Notary, and Karin Konoval.
