Why Cinephiles Should Care About Matt Reeves' The Planet of the Apes Films

Dawn of The Planet of the Apes is unlike any sci-fi blockbuster ever made. It's Shakespeare with apes — a story about how the collapse of communication, along with the primitive and violent sides of human and ape nature, threatens to burn down everything beautiful and hopeful in the world.

Reeves stated that his goal is to take genre films and find something that’s personal, grounded, and real in them. 

From a technical perspective, it’s a feast for the eyes. Moving master shots pull us through a colorful, intricately blocked post-apocalyptic world. The camera rarely moves but the space around it is in constant flux. In one dramatic set piece, the real action (a tank ploughing through enemy lines) is obscured from the viewer and we’re given a limited perspective of the event from the tank's turret, allowing our minds to fill in the gap. 

Matt Reeves, the director of both Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), represents an alternative approach to the creatively dead franchise film era by bringing indie and 70s influences into blockbuster filmmaking. Dawn is his highest achievement, blending genre thrills (like an ape dual-wielding machine guns) with elegant camerawork and soulful storytelling. But one can't really understand how Reeves is on track to save the action blockbuster until one understands the kind of mess we're in.

THE MESS

Enjoyers of large-scale cinema today are doom and gloom. Since the double-edged success of the original Star Wars put the final nail in the coffin of the writer-director-led 1970s movement of New Hollywood, our epic movies have been hammered to death with rubbery computer generated imagery, photographed with stale shot-reverse-shot “coverage” lacking any style or blocking, and over-lit in flatly composed, green-screened studios to deliver an image that is optimized for a streaming app on a phone screen. How the mighty have fallen.

People who grew up on action flicks and sweeping epics from as disparate of directors as Don Siegel and Akira Kurosawa can agree that we’ve lost something visually and narratively in blockbusters. In another era, this might’ve been only an inconvenience: mainstream cinema offered other kinds of stories. We had our small oddball 70s crime thrillers, our rom-coms and coming-of-age stories of the Sundance-Miramax 90s generation, and our mid-budget character dramas in nearly all decades. If the fantasy, action, and sci-fi spectacles were lacking, who cares? There’s a big menu! Today, that menu has shrunken, and it’s deficiency can be illustrated by two dates: 2009 and 2014.

THE FRANCHISE FILM AGE

In 2009, Disney bought Marvel and solidified the franchise film age, threatening the last holdouts of original stories. The new trend: risk-averse sequels and remakes of profitable intellectual property within cinematic universes. These cinematic universes like Spiderman, Lion King, and Lilo and Stitch are controlled by studio executives, boards of directors, and shareholders. The algorithm optimizes for broad-based content that appeals to global audiences, stripping movies of their idiosyncrasy and texture.

When you realize these "stories" are not the brainchildren of directors or writers (people) but instead of marketing strategies, is it any surprise they staff them with journeyman professionals who toil in fluorescent backlot studios under the all-seeing eye of the algorithm, and worse, the fanbase? Is there no more horrid world in all the English language than the “fanbase,” a tyrant who stabs out the eyes of any real director or artist and replaces them with a rubber-stamping, machine-navigating pet whose sole objective is to keep the fans happy and deliver an on-time, under-budget product to shareholders. How is a good movie made in this system? No one seems to know, or care. But the publicly traded corporation's stock price is up!

THE STREAMING PROBLEM

The second problem: streaming slashed profitability, creating an economic system where personal, adult-oriented medium-sized stories are no longer economically viable to make. By 2014, revenue from streaming subscriptions surpassed DVD sales. As DVDs became replaced by streaming with its upfront one-time payment model (instead of a residual payment model), the monolithic blockbuster replaced the mid-budget film as the bread and butter of studios. Streaming either pays a flat license fee for a film or it’s bundled into a subscription model that pays its creators far less per viewer than what could be made on DVD sales after theatrical release.

Again, this trend had been accelerating since 1977 with Star Wars, so much so that when George Lucas showed his original cut to his brilliant peers including Brian De Palma, they were horrified about its downstream effects on the industry. But back when production houses collected DVD revenue before streaming, they could afford to experiment on smaller more relationship-driven films like Good Will Hunting, beating back against the franchise machine. Now, however, the risk is too great. And who better to explain this trend than the star and creator of Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, in his appearance on Hot Ones:

"The DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream. And technology has just made that obsolete. The movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater, because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release. And six months later, you'd get a whole other chunk. It would be like reopening the movie almost. And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make a hundred million dollars before I got into profit. The idea of making a hundred [million] dollars on a story about this love affair between these two people. Yeah, I love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kinds of movies, the kind of movie that I loved and the kinds of movies that were my bread and butter." 

These forces combined to create a modern mainstream cinema that delivers one thing: the spectacle blockbuster. It’s never been more important to find directors that can lead large-scale genre projects with a sense for inventive images and stories and not merely deliver a corporate product designed to maintain theme parks and toy sales. If we’re stuck with action blockbusters, they better be directed by people who respect the form.

THE HERO

Enter Matt Reeves, a director who spent his childhood making 8mm short films and watching Raging Bull with his dad. When he was 15, Spielberg hired him to transfer some of his films to videotape. Reeves grew up wanting to be the new Hal Ashby and make sad quirky comedies in the 70s mold, but he soon found himself at the helm of a new kind of Godzilla YouTube project.

In Cloverfield (2008), Reeves experimented with a narrative device: telling a story through footage recorded at a friend's party which "accidentally" captures world historic events. Paramount expected quite a feat from Reeves: they wanted him to make a monster movie where a Godzilla-like creature destroys New York City for under $25 million. So he made Cloverfield: a $25 million “indie film." He saw a handheld video from a soldier’s tent in Iraq and was instantly inspired. He was fascinated how you couldn’t see much but from the sound and other limited perspective elements, you could still feel the drama. This limited perspective approach to storytelling trained Reeves in the technique of highly intentional, intricately blocked and planned filmmaking.

On a podcast, Reeves stated that his goal is to take genre films and find something that’s personal, grounded, and real in them.  Reeves’ films have more far more emotion than other blockbusters. How does he, practically speaking, achieve this?

In The Batman (2022), there are fewer cuts than most action flicks. Reeves opts for a slower, more atmospheric approach, staying on performances for a long time to let the characters and their emotions breath. The average shot length (how long the shot is held before it cuts) in The Batman is 4-6 seconds. Sounds short? Compare it to Michael Bay's Transformers (2007) with an average shot length of 2 seconds!

Reeves also relies heavily on a shallow depth of field (harkening back to his limited perspective philosophy of Cloverfield) to hide things from the viewer and allow our imaginations to fill in the gap. Many argue that Batman stories represent the pinnacle of superhero capeshit, everything that’s wrong with the industry. But Reeves found what’s personal in it. He got his visual queues from Klute (1971) and its moody nocturnal cinematography from Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall, All The President's Men). While writing the screenplay for The Batman, Reeves listened to “Thank God for the Rain” from the Taxi Driver soundtrack on loop to get into the right mindset. This wouldn't be Avengers; this would be a 1970s detective noir shot in a rainswept corrupt New York City.

A NEW DAWN

Although his record reads more like an indie filmmaker and auteur, he’s found himself at the helm of one of the biggest action franchises of our time: Planet of the Apes. Reeves sense of images both intimate and epically fiery far exceeds what one would expect from an action movie about talking chimps. Reeves always has his mind on blocking. He frames his sequences as detailed moving masters*, carrying the viewer through this carefully laid out world before pulling us into close-ups for intense emotional impact.

moving master: a shot that films the majority of a scene in a single, unbroken take, with the intention of editing in other shots later

These are expertly made blockbusters, shot with intention and forethought instead of relying on the editing room to hack something together like its peers. Dawn was shot in native 3D, meaning the 3D effect in computer-generated sequences is captured in-camera at the time of filming, rather than being added later in post-production. This gives the digitally designed action scenes realistic depth perception; it makes them grittier, more alive. Yes this style of shooting requires much more planning, but Reeves has no trouble with that. 

The other element which separates Dawn from its peers is its lighting. Most blockbusters today are completely over-lit. They're blown out with light, each frame smoothed over to prevent the background and foreground from popping; this has become a default "setting" because movies are now watched on phones during the day. The chiaroscuro (or unevenly falling shadows in dark mood lighting) of a Gordon Willis in The Godfather could never be appreciated in this setting. We've optimized our movies for this, intentionally designing them to look cheap, flat, and uninteresting. But not Reeves. Right from his opening shot, we're thrown into a world of textured fur, blood, mud, scars, and war paint, captured dramatically with low-key lighting. This is the same kind of lighting that was popular in the genre films Reeves grew up loving, from film noir to 70s thrillers.

Low-key lighting is high contrast, single-source lighting with deep blacks and dark tones and minimal fill light. To achieve this, Reeves needs to limit the ambient light in a scene and tightly control his light source

THE LESSON

If you're a movie lover who never gave Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a chance because the concept of talking apes who took over the world seemed silly, I understand. Is it as good as Klute or Godfather or Taxi Driver or any of the other listed titles which inspired Reeves in his making of the film? Probably not. But I'd say it's the best sci-fi action movie of the 2010s, and as long as we're stuck in a system which recycles old IP into a never-ending stream of franchise blockbusters, we'd better hope we have the right creatives like Matt Reeves to bring something redeeming to these projects. Cinephiles everywhere should pay close attention to Reeves and his Planet of the Apes franchise; it’s success may show a way forward for a troubled genre and a disintegrating industry at large.

Disagree with my take? Think Dawn of the Planet of the Apes should be replaced by ten more Spiderman movies? Let me know: milesvstephenson@gmail.com