'War For The Planet Of The Apes' First Look: Matt Reeves Teases Fans Of The 1968 Classic
Production on War for the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to last year's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, has begun. Director Matt Reeves is back behind the camera for the sequel that continues the Planet of the Apes origin story that began back in 2011, and he just revealed a photo from the set of the sequel that serves as a nice tease for fans of the original 1968 movie.
Check out the War for the Planet of the Apes first look photo below!
Here's what Matt Reeves posted through his Twitter page:
#It has begun.@ApesMovies pic.twitter.com/6AZVzWfJXW
— Matt Reeves (@mattreevesLA) October 17, 2015
But if you want a better look at the image, here's a larger version for you to check out:
Planet of the Apes has quite an iconic moment on the beach at the end of the original movie, involving one of America's most recognizable landmarks, and one of the most famous lines in cinema history. Really everything about this sequence is iconic.
So will there be some kind of connection between the ending of Planet of the Apes and whatever happens in War for the Planet of the Apes? Considering the title is teasing a major battle between humans and the evolved apes, could we possibly see the moment when the Statue of Liberty gets destroyed? It would be hard for the statue to be destroyed in such a way that the entire top half was able to end on a beach like that, but any scene depicting the statue's destruction likely wouldn't have to adhere to that detail. After all, here's what Reeves previously said about the prequel story arc eventually running into the 1968 storyline:
The idea would never be to remake the '68 film. There might be some of those events from another perspective, and obviously to also see them as events that grew out of everything that we've been watching from this new iteration. They wouldn't be exactly the same either. So if, and when, we ever get there, which I think is an exciting notion, it would definitely not be a remake but it would be sort of a re-telling of those events from a new perspective. And the events themselves would probably be a bit different since they will have grown out of these films.
War for the Planet of the Apes has recently added some stars, with Woody Harrelson and Gabriel Chavarria playing new human characters. Harrelson is playing the new villain known as the Colonel while Chavarria is the new human lead with a role that has been likened to that of James Franco's in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That probably means Jason Clarke's character from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes isn't in the picture anymore, so he may have been killed or simply moved on in order to keep his family safe.
In addition, Steve Zahn has been brought on as a new ape, so there's a chance that maybe he's one of the two motion-capture actors we see in Matt Reeves' beach photo. The one of the horse is likely Andy Serkis as Caesar, but we can't be sure.
Otherwise, we don't know much about the movie besides the fact that the title indicates a rather big conflict on the horizon for humans and apes. Hopefully we'll hear more about the sequel as production continues, maybe even with some more photos from the set.
War for the Planet of the Apes arrives on July 14th, 2017.