War for the Planet of the Apes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the breath.

In the cold stretches of War for the Planet of the Apes, vapor leaves Caesar's nostrils and hangs for a beat before the wind takes it. The fur is wet and stays wet. Snow lands on his shoulders and melts where he is warm. All of it was rendered, including the eyes, and the eyes are where this movie lives.

Matt Reeves's particular invention, with Michael Seresin behind the camera and Weta Digital under Joe Letteri and Dan Lemmon, was to drag performance capture outdoors and then trust it with silence. The performers worked in marker rigs on the actual locations, in the actual weather, so the digital apes could be lit by the same grey sky and the same firelight as the plates they stand in. Having built that machine, Reeves did the odd thing with it. He made a summer tentpole whose central instrument is a face that does not talk, and then he stayed on it.

Deleuze is useful here for one reason above all: he took the close-up more seriously than almost anyone. For him it is not a magnified detail. It is a separate kind of image, the affection-image, a face pulled loose from the space and time around it, holding a feeling that has not yet discharged into an act. He divides the species. Some faces are still surfaces reflecting a single quality, wonder or patience or grief; he calls that a qualisign, and Karin Konoval's Maurice is shot that way, the film's steady horizon. Other faces are made of small movements climbing toward a limit. That one he calls a potisign, a face of power in the sense of potential: something is being approached, and the face is the approaching. Caesar is a potisign for most of this film. Weta rebuilt the ocular and facial-muscle systems precisely so that micro-expression would read, and Serkis uses that resolution to play someone deciding whether to become his enemy.

This is why the war picture can go so long without much war and never go slack. The suspense is not what will happen. It is what that face is about to turn into.

Then Reeves puts him in a cage.

Through the long middle, Caesar is held inside the Colonel's quarry while ape prisoners haul stone for a wall, and he can do nothing but look. Deleuze calls images like this pure optical situations, opsigns, and the person they happen to a voyant, a seer. This is his hinge between the two cinemas. In the movement-image, perceiving leads to acting and acting changes the situation; that circuit is the engine of nearly every studio film ever cut. In the time-image it breaks, and looking is all there is, and time stops being the measure of what you do and becomes the thing you are stuck inside. Finding that in the second act of a franchise capper is genuinely strange. Hoy and Salfas cut it patiently, withholding combat, trusting dead air.

And you read it. So much of the story is signed, glanced, breathed, subtitled. Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its automatic self-evidence and asks instead to be deciphered is the lectosign, the readable image, and he attached it to the most difficult European cinema he knew. Reeves put it in a blockbuster and bet that an audience would follow. That bet is the film's real contribution to narrative: it proved you can run long passages of wordless, nonhuman interiority at scale. The bodies carry the rest. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a social relation a gest, and this film is full of them, the line of captives bent under stone, Caesar isolated in the frame as the burdened one, all of it composed so that stance does the work dialogue usually does.

It also presses on the oldest argument in film theory. Bazin grounded cinema's authority in the photograph. The camera was there, the thing was there, light actually bounced. Nothing bounced off Caesar; he has no skin. Yet the film carries a documentary weight most digital spectacle cannot, and the reason sits in the production notes. The performers were there, in the snow and the rain, on location, in rigs. The index did not disappear. It moved from the skin to the body underneath it.

The Colonel is a different order of image. Deleuze keeps a category for figures who are not really acting but being driven, the impulse-image, and gives it a habitat he calls the originary world: a place that looks like an ordinary setting and turns out to be a pit where only appetites operate. James Chinlund's quarry is that, a hole cut in the earth, a wall going up for reasons that live inside one man's head, prisoners hauling the stone. Impulse always runs downhill in Deleuze, toward exhaustion. The film supplies a literal slope: a mutation of the engineered virus is stripping surviving humans of speech and reason. Apes climbing into language, humans sliding out of it, and Reeves shoots both as faces.

The debts are open, and the film says so. Someone has painted APE-POCALYPSE NOW on the compound wall. Coppola's chassis is right there, the journey toward a commander who has written his own scripture. The Bridge on the River Kwai supplies the labor camp as a moral arena run on one officer's fixation. The Great Escape supplies the tunnel and the sentries.

What Reeves builds out of those parts is a founding. Deleuze, late in his work on cinema, became interested in films where "the people are missing": political filmmaking that cannot address a public already sitting there, and so has to help invent one. The tool is fabulation, catching people in the act of legending themselves. Caesar's apes are a people under construction, and the film is unembarrassed about the register, casting him as Moses, bondage behind, a promised land he will not fully enter. The Colonel is legending himself too. Two acts of storytelling, one making a people and one making a cult.

Genre promises a duel. The film keeps the shape of the large-form action picture, a pressing situation that one decisive act is supposed to transform, and then arranges for the transformation to arrive as grief rather than triumph.

The lineage runs both directions here, which is rare. War descends from Schaffner's 1968 film and also manufactures it: the virus that takes human speech, and the mute child named Nova, are that world's seed. Forward, it settled an argument. After this Caesar, saying that capture performance is not acting became hard to do with a straight face, and Reeves went from this trilogy to The Batman.

Watch it again for the pauses. Watch what Caesar's face is doing when nothing is happening, because that is the film. And notice what it declines to resolve. His people are founded on a journey he began for revenge, and the picture never quite says whether the promised land is clean of it.