Matt Reeves
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The Great Escape (1963)
Directed by John Sturges
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Plot Visuals
The final act is derivative to a fault (think “The Great Escape” or “The Grand Illusion” with a few more big explosions), but the apes’ perseverance freshens up the formula.
As in episodes one through three of the “Star Wars” franchise, Reeves is operating in revisionist-prequel mode, filling in the calamitous backstory that leads to a depressing present reality — except that in this case, he’s less concerned with mythology, approaching this chapter as an elaborate homage to such manly classics as “The Great Escape,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Apocalypse Now,” starring monkeys.
"War for the Planet of the Apes" references many films - "The Great Escape," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Searchers" to name a few - but its larger grasp is historical, a new civilization forming as an old one wanes.
“We watched The Great Escape.
“War” follows their long journey through the woods until it shifts in its second half to a riveting prison camp thriller, with heavy overtones of previous war films, from “Apocalypse Now” to “The Great Escape.”
There’s even a slice of “The Great Escape” thrown in as the knuckle-dragging prisoners scheme to outwit their upright captors.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Themes Characters
As in episodes one through three of the “Star Wars” franchise, Reeves is operating in revisionist-prequel mode, filling in the calamitous backstory that leads to a depressing present reality — except that in this case, he’s less concerned with mythology, approaching this chapter as an elaborate homage to such manly classics as “The Great Escape,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Apocalypse Now,” starring monkeys.
This small army is led by The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), a bald, sadistic military leader who found a role model in Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.
"War for the Planet of the Apes" references many films - "The Great Escape," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Searchers" to name a few - but its larger grasp is historical, a new civilization forming as an old one wanes.
Playing against type, Harrelson is understated and terrifying channeling Brando in Apocalypse Now as the ruthless, deranged Colonel.
Here, he’s pitted against The Colonel, played by Woody Harrelson, and if Caesar is in “A Man Escaped,” Harrelson is planted firmly in “Apocalypse Now,” down to the black face paint and ‘70s rock (the film even has some fun with the reference, with “Ape-pocalypse Now” graffiti’d on tunnel walls).
Led by the brutal and skilled military commander known only as the Colonel (Woody Harrelson channeling Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now”), the goal of the military forces is complete ape genocide.
Paul Dano is fantastic as the Riddler, who forgoes most humor or charm and instead embraces a more serial killer vibe that’s reminiscent of Zodiac or Seven .
But as The Batman progresses further, Dano’s serial-killer character that echoes the respective antagonists from David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007) with a dash of Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw from the Saw franchise, looks like he’s trying too hard to make his Riddler a standout.
Reeves (who co-wrote the film with Peter Craig) brings an excellent amount of style to “The Batman,” though it often feels like it’s borrowing a lot from David Fincher (particularly “Se7en” and “Zodiac”) with some Michael Mann thrown in for good measure.
In using David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac as inspirations for his vision, Reeves has made his magnum opus that rivals the best we’ve seen from any previous version of the Dark Knight on the screen.
It’s going for Zodiac , clearly, but everything involving The Riddler reminded me o f The Snowman , the infamously ludicrous 2017 serial killer movie with Michael Fassbender.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was influenced by the films of David Fincher, especially Se7en and Zodiac .
The Searchers (1956)
Directed by John Ford
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Characters Plot
"War for the Planet of the Apes" references many films - "The Great Escape," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Searchers" to name a few - but its larger grasp is historical, a new civilization forming as an old one wanes.
Caesar is akin to Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, driven by vengeful hatred of a race/species to an unbecoming brink.
Picking up 15 years after the outbreak of the population-decimating simian flu, the film feels like a primate hybrid of The Searchers, The Great Escape, and Apocalypse Now (with lone human movie star, Woody Harrelson, in the gonzo Kurtz role).
Combining the premises and conceits of two earlier 2017 blockbusters – Kong: Skull Island and Logan – War will also remind viewers of classic tales like The Searchers, Apocalypse Now, The Empire Strikes Back and Spartacus.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Directed by David Lean
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Plot Themes Visuals
As in episodes one through three of the “Star Wars” franchise, Reeves is operating in revisionist-prequel mode, filling in the calamitous backstory that leads to a depressing present reality — except that in this case, he’s less concerned with mythology, approaching this chapter as an elaborate homage to such manly classics as “The Great Escape,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Apocalypse Now,” starring monkeys.
The movie is also profoundly indebted to the cinema of David Lean, specifically The Bridge on the River Kwai, as the apes are gathered into work camps to build a massive wall at the insistence of their human captors.
The movie branches off onto an unexpected route, taking inspiration not only from the other Planet of the Apes films but from classic war pictures like The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai .
Most of the spoken dialogue, by contrast, falls to Harrelson’s Colonel, a worthy new adversary who at one point gets a deranged, nihilistic monologue that further underscores his resemblance to Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” That’s just one of a few classics that Reeves has cited as overt influences, including the Clint Eastwood western “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments,” and the World War II-era classics “The Great Escape” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Reeves and cinematographer Michael Seresin have combined to make a film in which every single moment—whether it is a quiet contemplation of Caesar and his surroundings or one of the massive action sequences—is striking to the eye and even contains sly visual homages to such classics as “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Apocalypse Now” for good measure.
It’s a movie packed with powerful set pieces—escapes, rescues, fights to the death—majestically shot by Michael Seresin and staged in a dazzling panoramic style that recalls the masterworks of director David Lean, especially The Bridge on the River Kwai, and more popcorn-oriented stuff like The Great Escape.
The film is more of a police procedural in the vein of David Fincher’s SE7EN (1995); it’s been noted that Reeve’s version of Riddler is partly inspired by the infamous serial killer Zodiac who operated in California in the late 1960s, hence the Fincher vibes.
But as The Batman progresses further, Dano’s serial-killer character that echoes the respective antagonists from David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007) with a dash of Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw from the Saw franchise, looks like he’s trying too hard to make his Riddler a standout.
Reeves (who co-wrote the film with Peter Craig) brings an excellent amount of style to “The Batman,” though it often feels like it’s borrowing a lot from David Fincher (particularly “Se7en” and “Zodiac”) with some Michael Mann thrown in for good measure.
In using David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac as inspirations for his vision, Reeves has made his magnum opus that rivals the best we’ve seen from any previous version of the Dark Knight on the screen.
Unlike previous cinematic versions of the caped crusader, Reeves takes interesting creative liberties and steers “The Batman” into a detective noir complete with major David Fincher vibes (think if “Se7en'' or “The Zodiac” had Batman walking around).
The Caped Crusader, Jim Gordon, and Selina investigating the clues provided by The Riddler, The Riddler’s John Doe, Se7en inspired contraptions for his kills, and the slow uncovering of the rot in Gotham politics makes for a satisfying detective story that never becomes dull and engrosses the audience completely.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Themes Visuals Plot Characters
In title and spirit, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes evokes the “Dawn of Man” opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an obvious influence on director Matt Reeves ( Cloverfield , Let Me In).
(One is reminded of the best moments from Rise, the ones set within the ape prison, and also of the great prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
The end result plays like a cranked-up simian riposte to the French-Canadian film Quest for Fire , or an alternative-universe extension of the "dawn of man" sequence from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , which went head to head with the original Planet of the Apes in 1968.
One need only think of the primates at the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey," some of the title characters in "Gorillas in the Mist," and, obviously, all of the "Planet of the Apes" films over the years for examples of such work.
But the “Apes” in “Dawn” are awfully darned appealing, learning the hard way that ape lesson of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”– that murder and treachery are the traits that make us, and them, most human.
It's an extended sequence — the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind — but pulse-quickening with the colony's mass agility and power, hunting deer and defending against a bear.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Nothing, to my taste, beats the 1968 original "Planet of the Apes," but then again, few sci-fi films have matched that movie’s mix of thrills, high camp, and high concept, plus that great kicker of an ending.
This homage to the 1968 Planet of the Apes film will be remembered and respected for decades to come.
Something else that I really enjoyed about War is this idea that the Simian Flu had mutated, leaving any survivors susceptible to new, horrific effects, which is a nod to the type of humans we meet in 1968’s Planet of the Apes .
War for the Planet of the Apes, which caps this science-fiction trilogy, is not only the best installment of the new Apes films, it’s one of the best summer blockbusters in year — and the best Apes film since the original classic Planet of the Apes in 1968.
I am sure we will be seeing an all new trilogy in the coming years that will bring us back to the world of apes closer to that one depicted in the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes.
Several characters from the 1968 film appear here in younger form: Cornelius (played in Planet of the Apes by Roddy McDowell) is an infant and Nova (Linda Harrison) is a young girl.
Super 8 (2011)
Directed by J.J. Abrams
influenced by Cloverfield (2008), Let Me In (2010)
Visuals Themes
What we have here is a clichéd combination of just about every hulking, goopy, multi-tentacled creature seen prior, made even more disappointing by how similaryet inferiorit is to the alien in 2008's " Cloverfield ."
Abrams adepts will recall a similar story, of young people banding together to face a ravenous monster, from Cloverfield, the 2008 alien-invasion film he produced.
But I didn’t like Cloverfield and unfortunately, Super 8, your period piece tribute to the Spielbergian era of sci-fi optimism feels at times like it has more of the Cloverfield emptiness, action for action’s sake, than Spielberg’s patented emotional connection with his protagonists.
Abrams also includes offhand references to Alien, Transformers and his own Cloverfield.
As written and directed by J. J. Abrams ( Star Trek ), Super 8 comes across more like a creative combination of Goonies and Cloverfield .
This being 1979, their movie—about a zombie cover-up—is being filmed on a Super 8 film camera, with the intention of entering a Super 8 film festival (hey, just like J.J. Abrams did with Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, in their early teens!).
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Visuals
This scene looks like something out of “Platoon” or “We Were Soldiers” or “Full Metal Jacket” — and it’s hardly the only time “War for the Planet of the Apes” will remind us of a superbly crafted Vietnam war film.
Their leader, Caesar (Andy Serkis) , is now the most wanted beast in the nation, and Reeves wastes no time getting to the interspecies mayhem, opening his sequel with a siege on the apes’ remote stronghold that’s carried out by grunts whose helmets are emblazoned with Full Metal Jacket-esque slogans like “Monkey Killer” and “Endangered Species.”
Desde el arranque, queda claro que Reeves se ha inspirado en clásicos como Apocalypse Now y Full Metal Jacket.
Playing with genre, the filmmaker takes his cues from the cold austerity of “Full Metal Jacket,” Clint Eastwood‘s Western tropes, “The Great Silence,” and the same wintery Westerns that informed “The Hateful Eight.”
Schindler's List (1993)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Visuals Themes
And this one ends up being betrayed by its homages to Apocalypse Now (there’s an “Ape-ocalypse Now” scrawled on a dilapidated wall at the midpoint, just in case viewers missed the other references), Schindler’s List , The Great Silence , and other classics; the sum of their ambitions can’t help but cast the formulaic, over-extended wartime prison-break that is War’s third act in an unflattering light.
Cool shout-outs to Schindler’s List though, bro.
Some "Schindler's List."
It’s more Schindler’s List than Hogan’s Heroes.
The Colonel himself stands on the balcony, looking down on the suffering apes just in the way that Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Göth took stock of the prisoners in Schindler’s List.
The film also has the misfortune of coming in the wake of Cloverfield and District 9, which were much bigger and more accomplished renderings of similar ideas.
Made on the kind of budget that Robert Rodriguez would describe as “tight”, Monsters isn’t a tequila-flavoured Cloverfield (no matter how much the distributors wish it was), but instead a meditative journey through a battle-ravaged wasteland filled with extra-terrestrial wildlife.
But good sound design, canny special effects and a jackdaw's approach to location scouting can't hide the fact that Monsters' protagonists are almost completely unlikeable, which leaves the film - along with Cloverfield - squarely in the first-person/low-budget curio basket rather than the annals of great sci-fi with District 9.
For much of the film, the aliens are only glimpsed briefly via news reports and video cameras (ala Cloverfield), and one sequence, in which Andrew, Sam and their Mexican guides are attacked in the jungle, is a deft piece of filmmaking.
His film is more in the vein of Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting than Cloverfield – which could be a problem commercially.
The buzz: Is this a low-budget blend of “District 9” and “Cloverfield” with a few parts “Jurassic Park” thrown in?
His giddy inventiveness rivals the stark grandiosity of 2008's " Cloverfield " while offering up exceptionally photorealistic creature designs that nonetheless manage to pay loving homage to the Japanese features of generations' past.
But rather than harken back to the aesthetic of Godzilla’s traditional adversaries—Rodan, Mothra, etc.—the MUTOs are exactly the kind of oddly-jointed grotesqueries that have been in such vogue more recently, from Starship Troopers to Cloverfield to Pacific Rim.
Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla" takes its cues from that great sequence, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of " Cloverfield ," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of " Apocalypse Now ," in which American soldiers' enemies were portrayed as faraway shadows, shooting flares and yelling obscenities.
And the whole monster film from the helpless human perspective was already done in far more riveting fashion with the exhilarating Cloverfield .
Like Cloverfield or Pacific Rim — both Godzilla movies that happened to not actually star Godzilla, both movies this one is obligated to one-up creatively if not commercially — it tries to logically extrapolate how our first contact with Big G might play out if it happened today.
These nuke-eaters resemble insect versions of the “Cloverfield” creature, with alien-like heads and eyes like LED strips running around their faces.
This iteration draws on films like Se7en and Klute , as well as famed Batman tales like Year Two and The Long Halloween .
Muy lejos de la fábrica de chorizos del hijo de puta de Kevin Feige de la factoría Marvel, responsable de dos décadas de bodrios que califican de productos excrementicios y/ o insufribles, aunque asimismo manteniendo una buena distancia para con los desastres pomposos, sensibleros y seudo importantes de Zack Snyder y los demás autómatas o mercenarios de DC Cómics que empezaron la catarata de exploitations de aquellas tres maravillas de Nolan con Christian Bale, Reeves nos ofrece un neo noir hecho y derecho con toques de horror, cine de acción y thriller testimonial que está inspirado en simultáneo en Barrio Chino ( Chinatown , 1974), de Roman Polanski, por las constantes alusiones al entramado de corrupción que atraviesa a toda Ciudad Gótica, ahora con el narcotráfico reemplazando a la especulación inmobiliaria y los chanchullos basados en el sistema de irrigación, y en Klute (1971), de Alan J. Pakula, especialmente en lo que atañe a esa premisa centrada en el devenir de un detective, el John…
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
influenced War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Visuals Characters
As Caesar becomes obsessed with taking out the Colonel after a deadly strike against the apes’ camp, the film becomes a riff on classic Clint Eastwood revenge westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven.
Most of the spoken dialogue, by contrast, falls to Harrelson’s Colonel, a worthy new adversary who at one point gets a deranged, nihilistic monologue that further underscores his resemblance to Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” That’s just one of a few classics that Reeves has cited as overt influences, including the Clint Eastwood western “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments,” and the World War II-era classics “The Great Escape” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
There are scenes that feel straight out of a Clint Eastwood film – look for visual homages to The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven – and there are no rousing feelgood action-beat moments.
Like the recent Kong: Skull Island , it’s a half-hearted allegory for the Vietnam War, the war that has to stand in for all wars, because it’s the only one that American culture has deigned it okay to hate on; and like Logan , it’s a stealth Western passing itself off in a more marketable genre, with Serkis, the Lon Chaney of mo-cap, playing the graying, gun-slinging Caesar as an obvious, grimacing impression of Clint Eastwood circa The Outlaw Josey Wales .
But Matt Reeves’ decision to choose Robert Pattinson for the role instantly reminded me how Tim Burton made an unconventional choice picking then-primarily-comedian Michael Keaton in Batman back in 1989.
If her arc is about sleuthing out her mysterious parentage, the answer is unfulfilling and stinks of the "Joker killed Bruce's parents" contrivance of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman ."
In fact, Farrell is totally unrecognisable in this film, giving off a strong Robert DeNiro as Al Capone vibe ala The Untouchables.
Colin Farrell plays this film's Penguin (or "Oz," presumably for Oswald) like Robert De Niro's Al Capone from The Untouchables , a rapacious, corpulent, insatiable human monster bearing little resemblance (outside of an understated dandy-ish flair to his wardrobe) to the traditional depictions of the character as an overcompensating victim of lifelong bullying (but stay tuned, as Farrell will reprise the role at length in an upcoming HBO Max series, just as Wright will play Gordon in HBO Max's upcoming Gotham PD series).
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick
influenced Cloverfield (2008)
Themes Visuals
There have been some great ones—2007's " [REC] " and 2008's " Cloverfield " spring to mind—but "The Blair Witch Project" remains the best of the bunch.
I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia.
Comme toute bonne catastrophe qui se respecte, c’est dans les rues de New York que se déroule se croisement pour le moins inusité entre Godzilla et The Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project and Diary of the Dead proved that this handheld format is completely viable and sustainable in feature length horror films, but it�s difficult to even consider Cloverfield a horror film, since in its action scenes, it�s far more concerned with spectacle than suspense.
I admire the less-is-more aesthetic of films like "Open Water" and was a fan of "The Blair Witch Project," which I described at the time as "a crude but stunningly pure and elemental act of the imagination."
So if an out-of-nowhere groundbreaker like The Blair Witch Project pushed such storytelling over into viable generic territory, then it only makes sense that a big-budget, predetermined hit like Cloverfield would one day consummate that marriage: the blockbuster finally merged with YouTube.
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
influenced by Cloverfield (2008)
Themes Visuals
The spiritual sequel to "Cloverfield" has been shrouded in mystery, but can the final product live up to the hype?
While producer J.J. Abrams describes “10 Cloverfield Lane” as being very different but in “the same wheelhouse” as the 2008 film “Cloverfield,” it still needs to be stressed that this intense, continually gripping and extremely engrossing movie is not a sequel to the equally excellent earlier film, also produced by Abrams.
There’s an adequate thriller in “10 Cloverfield Lane” – 60 year-old man saves (or abducts) 30 year-old woman and stashes her in his doomsday shelter, claiming a world-ending chemical attack – but it doesn’t deserve to share a name with 2008 cinematic theme park ride “Cloverfield.”
★★★½ Not so much a sequel as a sidebar to the 2008 "found footage" monster movie "Cloverfield," this ingenious and claustrophobic thriller is compact enough to be almost the movie equivalent of a black box theater production: For most of its length, it needs only three characters and a single location -- a well-stocked survivalist bunker -- to keep audiences on edge.
John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
…a “Distortus Rex” (which looks like a T-Rex mixed with the monster from Cloverfield)…
…the Cloverfield monster’s general physique…
…the latter of which has slightly longer arms, an H.R. Giger cranium, a Predator’s maw and the Cloverfield monster’s general physique.