War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

On the one hand, the analogy that the Planet of the Apes has stood for over the decades since Charlton Heston battled them can be said to have been gotten across, and why go on.  On the other hand, we live in an America that elected a president that should have been impossible to elect 50 years ago much less today, so maybe we really don't quite get it.
So here we go again.  

Bad Ape, an eccentric zoo primate, summarizes the genre well when he says: “Humans get sick, apes get smart, humans kill apes.”
This isn’t a buddy movie but, rather, a psychological western that breaks and becomes a revenge thriller war movie; trench warfare eferences are included free of charge. Michael Giacchino’s whirring score ratchets up the tension, while cinematographer Michael Seresin’s agile camera flies directly overhead (these are two aspects of the film that are spectacular. At times, the apes appear tiny, toy-soldier figurines from his bird’s eye perspective; on other occasions, the camera skims puddle-strewn beaches at hoof-level and swings with the apes as they clamber snowy pylons.
The film’s real technological achievement isn’t the rendering of CGI forests (though these are pretty very good) but the motion-capture apes themselves, huge liquid eyes.  Science fiction is part philosophy; here, the movie asks what distinguishes humans from animals. The twist is that as the apes get “smarter” (and the humans become crueller), they also grow softer, in a reminder that humanity resides in both the head and the heart.