‘Anaconda’ 2025 Reboot Edition is Just the Right Sort of Silly-Meta

December 23, 2025

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They want more than none (CREDIT: Matt Grace)

Starring: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye

Director: Tom Gormican

Running Time: 99 Minutes

Rating: December 25, 2025 (Theaters)

Release Date: PG-13 for Chomping and Squeezing and Some Drug Tripping

What’s It About?: Back in the ’90s, a group of friends were dreaming of a silver screen future. But flash-forward to the 2020s, and they’ve all settled into B-grade (maybe B+) lives. Doug (Jack Black) is a wedding videographer whose cinematic instincts keep getting rebuffed by his clients; Griff (Paul Rudd) is a bit part actor whose big break is nowhere in sight; Kenny (Steve Zahn) is working as Doug’s screwup assistant and trying to get sober; and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) is adrift in her foundering marriage. Upon reuniting, they decide in the thrill of the moment to produce an amateur remake of one of their favorite movies of all time: the notorious 1997 creature feature Anaconda. So then they actually fly down to the Amazon, rent a real live snake, and start shooting an actual goshdang moving picture. But it doesn’t take long for things to become pear-shaped, as the crew gets tightly wrapped within a misadventure that’s starting to resemble the original way more than they bargained for.

What Made an Impression?: How Not to Get Bit By an Excess of Cleverness: I haven’t been closely following the pre-production leading up to 2025’s Anaconda, but this definitely feels like a case of desperately trying to reboot intellectual property by any means possible. Settling on a goofy self-aware version could have been too cute by half, but with Jack Black and Paul Rudd in the leads, you’ve got the exact right stars to thread the needle. And honestly, Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script gets the point across pretty well on its own. As for the rest of the main players, Steve Zahn is absolutely a reliable enough supporting player, while Thandiwe Newton may be a little less practiced in this arena, but she understands the assignment as well as everybody else.
Subheading About What Made an Impression: As an example of how Anaconda makes the meta approach work, characters say the word “themes” as a punch line all by itself multiple times… and it works each time! (It certainly helps that one of the horror themes du jour they’re poking fun at is intergenerational trauma.)
Making It Happen: If Anaconda wants us to teach a lesson alongside all the slithering chaos, there are two opposing pitfalls it could have easily fallen into: telling us that it’s much safer to just give up on our dreams, or stubbornly insisting that we never give up on our dreams no matter what our reality. It’s not cynical enough for the former, and it’s actually thoughtful enough to avoid the latter. The message (as sweetly underscored by Doug’s wife Malie, played by the always-sweet Ione Skye) isn’t that we should just drop all our responsibilities to reclaim our lost passions. But rather, if we don’t give ourselves a chance (or at least an indulgence) every once in a while, our souls will just slowly wither away. And if we’re lucky, our most supportive loved ones will be there to nudge us along (and hopefully serve as our emergency contacts in case anything goes wrong!).

Anaconda (2025) is Recommended If You Like: Scream but wish that it were a creature feature

Grade: 3 out of 5 Themes

This Is a Movie Review: ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Makes for a Bleak But Transfixing Spectacle

July 10, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in July 2017.

Starring: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller

Director: Matt Reeves

Running Time: 142 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for War Violence Shot Artfully Enough to Avoid an R Rating

Release Date: July 14, 2017

The prequel/reboot Planet of the Apes series has been doing a fine job at that most pervasively needless of tasks: providing origin stories for elements from the original that never needed to be explained. The trick is to make those explanations part of their own particular tales that are compelling enough on their own. In the latest entry, War for the Planet of the Apes, the spotlighted origin is humankind’s loss of speech, which is essentially something that inexplicably and uncontrollably just starts happening, but is also presumably related to the virus from 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes that began to wipe out humanity and boosted apes’ intelligence. Far from a minor plot point, this provides the essential motivation for those who seek to stand in the way of nature.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) and the rest of the apes have been living mostly happily in the civilization they have constructed for themselves, but the peace between species they have brokered has only ever been uneasy. There is a vestige of what remains of intelligent humans that is intent on reasserting their dominance, most ferociously in the form of Colonel McCullough (Woody Harrelson), a ruthless fighter who justifies his tactics with a form of genetic engineering tinged with desperation. When a sneak attack by McCullough kills several of Caesar’s loved ones, the stage is set for an ultimate standoff. While Caesar’s reaction flirts somewhat uncomfortably with revenge territory, the conflict remains more generally compelling, as his larger motivation is protecting apes and simply wanting this war to end. The bleakness of ending war with more war (even in self-defense) is not ignored.

War for the Planet of the Apes can easily be read as a metaphor in which a dominant social group finds the status quo upended and tries to swing the pendulum back. Those moments can easily be found now and at many other points in the history of society. But what is remarkable is how much that is a side effect. This series is primarily devoted to commenting upon and analyzing itself more than anything else. That commitment extends to the thorough chilliness of the vision. It is never specified if the setting is in a particularly wintry area, or if the future is eternally snowy, or both. Either way, the effect is oppressive. There are moments of levity (most memorably from Steve Zahn’s “Bad Ape,” a jittery former circus animal who has gone a little loopy from cabin fever), but overall, this is a film that takes days to swallow to bear appreciating its majesty.

War for the Planet of the Apes is Recommended If You Like: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Apocalypse Now, The Searchers

Grade: 4 out of 5 Machine Gun-Toting Apes