War for the Planet of the Apes broader inspirations from films like "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "The Great Escape". Feeling that there was a need to imbue Biblical themes and elements, they also watched Biblical epics like "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments". The influences and inspirations were made evident in the relationship between Caesar and Woody Harrelson's Colonel, a military leader with pretensions toward godhood. Reeves has compared their relationship to the dynamic between Alec Guinness's British Commander and Sessue Hayakawa's prison camp Colonel in "Bridge on the River Kwai". Another comparison is in Caesar's journey to find the Colonel, flanked by a posse
Return from the River Kwai Return from the River Kwai Return from the River Kwai is a 1989 British film directed by Andrew McLaglen and starring Edward Fox, Chris Penn and Timothy Bottoms. It is not a sequel to "Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957), although it deals with POWS of the Japanese in World War Two. The film is based on a 1979 factual book with the same name about a 1944 Japanese prisoner transport of 2,217 British and Australian POWs, who had been working as forced labour on the Burma Railway, building the bridge over the River Kwai. They were taken by railway