I have to admit I was positively surprised how beautiful the CGI-images of simian life were and how genuinely functional mixture of paleofiction and sf the first 20 minutes of this film was.
And after that everything went horribly wrong. As an allegory this is the most openly racist Hollywood-film I've seen for ages, a b/ w 'species-war' where all the humans are white. The setting is the same as in 60's westerns where they were really trying to use the viewpoint of indigenous people, but the plot and characters are more simplistic. For example, they say that the virus has left alive only those who are 'genetically' best part of humankind, and then we see the society with mainly white characters?
How else should we interpret this movie than a racist nightmare story, when there are only black apes and white humans against each other? And why this worst human character has to be Dreyfus? To point out that the most unreliable soldier might have been noticed just because of his (jewish) name? And then - how should we see the meaning of the 'ape' ruler: is he really like Cesar or more like Malcolm X? The original Planet of the Apes had also it's racial subtext, but nothing has really changed in four decades, has it?
And after that everything went horribly wrong. As an allegory this is the most openly racist Hollywood-film I've seen for ages, a b/ w 'species-war' where all the humans are white. The setting is the same as in 60's westerns where they were really trying to use the viewpoint of indigenous people, but the plot and characters are more simplistic. For example, they say that the virus has left alive only those who are 'genetically' best part of humankind, and then we see the society with mainly white characters?
How else should we interpret this movie than a racist nightmare story, when there are only black apes and white humans against each other? And why this worst human character has to be Dreyfus? To point out that the most unreliable soldier might have been noticed just because of his (jewish) name? And then - how should we see the meaning of the 'ape' ruler: is he really like Cesar or more like Malcolm X? The original Planet of the Apes had also it's racial subtext, but nothing has really changed in four decades, has it?