For the week of October 23rd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing War for the Planet of the Apes to Blu-ray. Since Fox rebooted their Planet of the Apes franchise with 2011's terrific Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the studio has raised the bar on what these blockbuster actioners can do. The new Apes trilogy is so much better than it has any right to be; I expected an enjoyable-but-shallow series of man-vs.-monkey battles, but people like Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves (who directed this and its immediate predecessor, the great Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) have delivered often sobering looks at trauma and the difficulties of nation-building. One of the things I love about this last entry is that this title is intentionally misleading. Although we start with a bruising battle sequence - things go so bad so fast for an army battalion hunting ape leader Caesar (Andy Serkis, once again buried under layers of digital makeup, once again brilliant) through the forests of the Pacific Northwest - the main conflict is between human aggressors, not primate ones. Forced to abandon his tribe after a tragedy, Caesar begins seeking revenge against the unhinged colonel (Woody Harrelson, doing a hammy Colonel Kurtz impersonation) who killed his family, except the closer Caesar gets, the more he realizes that his target has planned violent machinations against the whole U.S. military. This simmering, human-scaled uprising unmoors us - one could argue that the film, in fact, lacks a war altogether - as a necessary step towards its larger thematic goals. The whole movie feels like a provocation. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes dealt with man's responsibilities towards technology, and Dawn recast the human and simian divisions as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then War argues against the whole of human existence. With one exception (Amiah Miller's Nova), War's human cast is venal, self-absorbed, and suicidally destructive. Reeves is more interested in tracking the next stage in civilization's evolution, and it's clear his heart is with the apes. And thanks to folks like Serkis, Steve Zahn (who is heartbreaking as the sweet, ironically named "Bad Ape"), and Karin Konoval (Caesar's loyal, thoughtful right-hand-orangutan Maurice), we're right alongside Reeves, too. Yes, the third act does over-traffic in prison clichés and Holocaust imagery and yes, Reeves bungles a couple of the big action beats as a concession to the PG-13 rating, but the strengths far outweigh the negatives. I love this film for its stillness, its gravity, its empathy towards those who suffer, and its interest in the silences between the battle sequences. In many ways, a remarkable example of the blockbuster form.
And we move from the blockbuster to the arthouse with Criterion's release of Personal Shopper. In theory, Personal Shopper might represent the most commercial film from director Olivier Assayas. He's making a ghost story about a medium (Kristen Stewart) searching for some line of communication with her dead twin brother, and he even deigns to concede to more than a few horror-movie requirements: a (vomiting) CGI apparition, a scary old house, and even a scene of bloody murder. But as anyone who has seen Clean or Clouds of Sils Maria can attest, Assayas always prefers the most oblique, glancing approach to genre. He's interested in the mostly unsaid, in the little details behind the big ones, and he uses Personal Shopper's supernatural elements to interrogate larger themes of dislocation. Her heroine can't escape it - an American living in France, she yearns for the dead more than she does for the living (Ty Olwin plays her diffident boyfriend, who only interacts with her through grainy Skype conversations), and that's when she's not acting as the assistant/shopper for a high-maintenance celebrity - and the spirits begin to feel like a representation of the whole human condition: the ways we're adrift, and always from ourselves. A provocative notion, to be sure. However, Personal Shopper is ultimately more fun to discuss than it is to, y'know, watch. Assayas' best quality is also his worst. He's incredibly prolific, which means you never know if you're going to get a career masterwork like Carlos or Personal Shopper, which plays like a solid-but-slight first draft. For every enthralling sequence (Stewart's text conversation with someone that might not be human), we get one or two half-formed scenelets, most notably the pretentiously inconclusive finale. Yet I can't dismiss Personal Shopper completely, and for one reason: Stewart, who is masterful in the lead. More than any young actor working today, she reminds me of James Dean. As with Dean, you'd never say she disappears into her characters, but you also don't care. Her persona is so magnetic that all of her tics and vocal affectations play like breathtaking emotional punctuations. We catch her character arc in a panicked stare, an unconscious hair toss, a breathless whisper. It's subtle showboating of the highest order. Stewart keeps us invested - she gives Personal Shopper the weight it so desperately needs.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes a 4K release for one of my favorite sports dramas: Gavin O'Connor's bruising Warrior. By any conventional metric, I should hate Warrior - it's melodramatic as hell (our main characters are two estranged brothers who are competitors in sports AND in life), it takes itself way too seriously (Masanobu Takayanagi's handheld cinematography plays like an audition for a John Cassavetes movie), and it's about MMA, which, to this viewer's eyes, resembles nothing less than two sentient, gore-soaked steaks writing their way back to life. However, as with O'Connor's similarly melodramatic-but-phenomenal hockey picture Miracle, Warrior transcends all those potential issues. O'Connor doesn't treat the film like a traditional sports movie. No, for him, MMA acts as an extension of his characters' inner torments. His leads, Tommy and Brendan Riordan (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, both splendid), feel so beaten down that MMA offers them an opportunity to strike back - Tommy is an Iraqi War veteran wrestling with PTSD, while Brendan's amiable teacher can't escape the daily grind of his lower-middle-class existence. But in the ring, they achieve something resembling control, even as their respective successes threaten to pit the two brothers against one another and reawaken years of brotherly strife. That emotional anticipation provides Warrior with its greatest measure of suspense. More than any of the fights (which, to the film's credit, have a visceral intensity that's mostly missing from actual MMA bouts), we're invested in these relationships, whether it's Tommy tentatively reaching out to his alcoholic father (Nick Nolte, splendid) or Brendan receiving guidance from his surprisingly thoughtful coach (Frank Grillo, in a performance so naturalistic I assumed O'Connor simply hired a nonprofessional actor). It's probably no surprise to say that Tommy and Brendan end up squaring off against one another, yet O'Connor has developed his leads so carefully that the ultimate outcome still feels agonizing - somehow, he manages to end the fight in such a manner that downplays who wins or loses, foregrounding instead a moment of genuine human connection. A sneaky little triumph, this one.
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Annabelle: Creation. With only minimal screentime, the Annabelle doll provided some of the most enduring thrills in James Wan's 2013 horror hit The Conjuring, yet the 2014 standalone prequel Annabelle couldn't have been blander and more dispiriting. But Creation is a nice surprise. You get the sense that everyone at New Line thought the first Annabelle was underwhelming (its worldwide box-office gross of $256 million notwithstanding), and that they thought they could do better. In that sense, styling Creation as a prequel works to satisfy more than just crass commercial decisions; it effectively lets the studio reboot the franchise and toss out everything that didn't work in the first picture. Gone is the generic 1960s milieu and bland apartment tenement murk: Creation junks all that in favor of the 1950s and a beyond-creepy orphanage, where a frightened-but-brave nun (the wonderful Stephanie Sigman, who should have become the biggest star in the world after her phenomenal Miss Bala performance) begins to suspect that a strange doll is playing host to some terrible demonic interference. Sigman proves an engaging heroine, and the child actors (including Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson) do yeoman's work with a thankless job - it is never easy pretending to be scared, but we never doubt their terror. Best of all is the influence of David F. Sandberg. Sandberg directed Lights Out, which was about two times better than it should have been - as B-movies go, it had style to burn and a half a dozen genuinely inventive scares. Sandberg brings that same energy to Creation. If the first Annabelle dealt in cheap jump shocks, Creation is a bit more patient, a bit more creative. Sandberg cites Robert Wise's landmark chiller The Haunting as his main inspiration, and while Creation isn't in the same league, I commend Sandberg for looking to his betters whenever possible. Ultimately, Creation does have to root itself in the extended Conjuring - we end on a cliffhanger and a post-credits scene teasing the upcoming The Nun - but the ride there works when you're on it.