My Biggest Gripe with War for the Planet of the Apes

There's a lot to be said about War for the Planet of the Apes, the third in a series of fictional movies that takes place in a world not too unlike our own, where apes become smarter than humans and eventually take away some of their jobs.

Overall, I think it's a fine film. Great, even. But there's one thing I really can't stand about it: Crossbow Steve. If you saw the movie, you know who I'm talking about. Otherwise, major spoilers ahead:


This guy right here:

I'm sure he has a name, but I call him Crossbow Steve because his weapon of choice throughout the movie is the silent, accurate, yet impractical crossbow. You might be confused as to why despite fighting alongside other soldiers who are instead wielding automatic rifles and grenade launchers, Steve has to make do with a weapon from before either were invented. And judging by his expression, he's probably wondering the same thing.

Aside from his namesake, Steve's other constant companion is his never-changing facial expression. No matter what the situation, you can be sure that Steve is going to be wearing a look that is equal parts horror, confusion, and incompetence.

Here's Steve hiding in the woods with his ape friend.

Steve surrendering to a bunch of monkeys!

Steve about to get a new hole to breathe through. How thoughtful of his captors!

Just kidding, the apes let him go. Haha, no way that's gonna end up biting them in the ass.

Throughout the entire film, in any scene that features Crossbow Steve, his face conveys the same message: "I'm scared, I don't wanna be here, why am I using a crossbow?"

When he's captured by the apes and maybe about to be executed, he looks understandably scared. While patrolling the ape cages, including the one with the child apes, he's unreasonably unsettled. But when he's bodyguarding the main antagonist of the movie, he looks nervous enough to accidentally shoot his boss. And when he's killing the unarmed protagonist at the climax of the movie, he looks like he's about ready to shit himself.

Yeah, you read that right. Crossbow Steve, whose expressions and demeanor paint him as a source of comic relief instead of a badass tertiary villain, deals the fatal blow that finishes off the film's main protagonist. Crossbow Steve, who barely has any lines and spends almost all of his screen time looking like he's on the verge of a panic attack, succeeds where bullets, mortars, hypothermia, starvation, and the ghost of a dead monkey all fail.

The movie does a great job channeling feelings of sadness and desperation and really making you sympathize with the good guys (the apes). It's careful about building up Caesar (the main monkey) to be a morally righteous leader who is conflicted by an unhealthy desire for vengeance, but ultimately proves himself less of a savage than many of the human antagonists.

Yet, he's done in by neither the Colonel (the main antagonist) nor the crushing despair and hopelessness of his people (arguably the secondary antagonist), but by the film's equivalent of Beni Gabor from The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one). You know, the bad guy who was bad at everything outside of being eaten by scarabs.

And with a name like Caesar, I wouldn't even hold it against the writers to have him killed by a timely betrayal. But no, it had to be Crossbow Steve. Goddammit.