A full, 7-minute scene from War for the Planet of the Apes was screened to New York Comic Con (NYCC) attendees. While the effects were far from finished — many shots were still the motion-capture actors, including Andy Serkis as Caesar — our first look at War for the Planet of the Apes looks compelling, textured and mournful, worthy of the post-apocalyptic world established in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The scene also hinted at a dark reality from the distant future of the Planet of the Apes series: brutish humans, without the capacity for speech.
The scene opens as Caesar and his band of merry apes approach a seaside oyster shack. A man carrying wood goes for a gun, forcing Caesar to blow him away with a shotgun. They enter the ramshackle building, scavenging from it what they can. In the back is a little girl, completely unable to talk. Maurice, the orangutan who’s been with Caesar since Rise, insists on bringing the young girl along. To Caesar’s chagrin, a human child joins their party.
In the original Planet of the Apes astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) meets a savage human population that has lost the capacity for speech. As the apes rise, the humans devolve. Since the original series, the incapacities of the ape future’s humans has become an important part of the Planet of the Apes lore. The excellent BOOM! Studios’ Planet of the Apes comics have made the loss of human speech an essential part of its lore. As tensions grow between apes and the ghettoized humans of Ape City, the human cause is undermined by a wave of mute births. Silence is spreading through the human genome like a sickness.
It seems the process is already underway in the days of War for the Planet of the Apes. Will this young girl, who joins Caesar on his quest to confront the Colonel (Woody Harrelson), be just a hint of things to come? Or are the humans of this Planet of the Apes prehistory already falling apart, losing their speech and their civilization at the same time?
We’ll find out when War for the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on July 14, 2017.
