The Colonel needs the free labor to build a border wall - never mind why - and the apes (among them the still-young Cornelius, hero of the original franchise) get beaten, starved, and forced to work. They get captured by the military and sentenced to labor in a prison camp run by an erratic, nameless colonel (Harrelson).

In it, we see the apes become a true underclass. War for the Planet of the Apes is a basic allegory that flirts, dangerously, with becoming an outright social issue drama. If the humans had only accepted, they’d have saved themselves, and saved us from this movie. 'Leave us the woods and the killing can stop,' offers Caesar. Led by the valiant, mean-mugging Caesar (Andy Serkis), the apes want to live separately, but equally. It’s a war 'for the planet,' but the apes aren’t colonizers, really. It is about the fight for the survival of two rival species: humans, who are still being wiped out by the lethal Simian flu, which originated as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and apes, who were once the test subjects for said treatment, but who were accidentally made hyperintelligent, and thus threatening, by it. More urgently, however, War for the Planet of the Apes has got heavy themes, bolstered with references to other heavy movies. It’s got the Serious Movie Starter Kit™ color palette, too, its hues averaging out to something between gray and grayer, as if the director, Matt Reeves, had consulted a mood board composed of a slab of wet concrete when dreaming up the movie. It’s got a runtime of two hours and 20 minutes, but it wasn’t directed by Judd Apatow, which means it’s definitely not a comedy, because who else in comedy would dare. This is a capital S, capital M, Serious Movie. But here comes War for the Planet of the Apes, the final volume of the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise, out to spite me. Here’s a movie pitch: Woody Harrelson rules over a kingdom of CGI apes.

Symbolism in planet of the apes