Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Batman, matt reeves, war for the planet of the apes

I Think We've Already Seen A Good Look At Matt Reeves' Take On Batman

Published Sun, 30 Apr 2017 14:28:00 -0500

Obvious things are obvious I guess, but sometimes you just have to let it hit you in the face. In talking to the LA Daily News about War for the Planet of the Apes, director Matt Reeves told them that Planet of the Apes and Batman are, "the two franchises which were the two that I was connected to most as a child." Given that Reeves would have been about 20 years old when Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was published, I suspect that obsession, or some level of it, extended beyond childhood. Comparing Batman to Planet of the Apes' Caesar seems odd at first thought, but then you read what he has to say about it, and remember this:

"It's a strange thing to be involved in the two franchises which were the two that I was connected to most as a child," Reeves says. "I just was obsessed with Batman when I was a kid. What I find so interesting about him as a character is that, as far a superhero goes, he's not superhuman, he is a person. And he is a tortured soul who is grappling with his past and trying to find a way to be in a world that has a lot that's wrong with it and trying to find a way to reconcile all of that.

"That is a really powerful character, in the same way that Caesar is such a powerful character."

An unlikely leader, an outlier, struggling to bring together an even more unlikely band of foot soldiers to impose order on a world that has just tipped past the brink of chaos? That does indeed sound very familiar.

Reeves elaborated on Caesar's story path in an interview with Bleeding Cool's Patrick Dane in 2014, with this tidbit that dovetails nicely with the above:

That is why I describe it as an anatomy of violence because you are looking at it and you go like, "well, you can understand if you were any of those characters why they might do this and why this problem becomes very hard to grapple with." That was a thing that I thought was a great test for Caesar, because Caesar is going to be a seminal figure in history, he has to go from being a revolutionary to a… because in the last movie, it is kind of stacked against the humans. The apes have been treated so poorly, that by the time they have that conflict on the golden gate bridge, you have no ambiguity about the rooting interest.