What Matt Reeves has done in "War For the Planet of the Apes" is bloody brilliant. The third, and presumably final, chapter in the "Apes" series is one of the most entertaining movies I've seen this year. The miraculous thing about it is that it barely has any dialogue. Sure, there are lines uttered here and there, but the fact that 99% of the apes can't speak and the main human character, a teenage girl, is deaf which results in a film that relies HEAVILY, instead of visuals, to tell its story.
"War" is better than "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" as it relies more heavily on character than actual war. There's no excess here, just pure unadulterated thrills that rely on the audiences smarts to pull through. Don't worry summer movie buffs, there is action, gloriously on display, especially in its final third, but Reeves is after much much more here. He's made the closest thing to a silent movie that we will likely have in today's Hollywood zeitgeist.
And so, his net project, DC's "The Batman," has just skyrocketed in anticipation. Zack Snyder's take on the caped crusader was limp and pummeling to the point where we had almost completely given up on having a film that might harken back to the glory days of the Christopher Nolan films. That is until Reeves showed up. The Shakespearean tragedy he's brought to the Apes movies is transcendent. Now comes word, via a talk Yahoo Movies had with the director, that his Batman movie will be a return to the Nolan-esque world we all loved: Film Noir, existential, bleak as black coffee, that's how we love our Batman:
“What I love that [Nolan] did was that he took the genre seriously. What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films. What I discovered is that this genre has the potential to be about something more. You can use the metaphors of the genre to talk about [a lot]. I think the other thing that I really admire in what [Nolan] did was knowing what it is to make a big studio film, which often can fall into that sense of committee filmmaking where there’s an anonymity to the point of view of the film. What I admire in what [Nolan] does is that, despite being a filmmaker in an enormous system, his perspective comes through. That to me was very exciting, it’s always exciting when you see a film of his because of that. That’s what I feel like I’ve been trying to do, it’s trying to allow a perspective to come through despite the fact that we’re in this very large studio movie world."
Excited yet? Just when we thought we couldn't trust DC movies anymore, they bring us "Wonder Woman" and now a Matt Reeves directed Batman movie. Comeback? Well, maybe after Snyder's "Justice League" is released this November ...
Excited yet? Just when we thought we couldn't trust DC movies anymore, they bring us "Wonder Woman" and now a Matt Reeves directed Batman movie. Comeback? Well, maybe after Snyder's "Justice League" is released this November ...