It’s ten years after the events of the first film, and most of the world’s population have been wiped out by ‘simian flu’. The few survivors living in San Francisco (which now looks like Playstation 3’s The Last of Us; towns covered in greenery, walls overgrown with vines etc.) blame the apes for this apocalypse. The apes are living in the woods they took in the first film. Caesar, the main ape from Rise’ who lead the revolution against humanity (Andy Serkis) is the leader of their ape community and they are doing well. They have a school and can all speak ape sign language (and more and more verbal English as the film goes on). When an ape is shot by a human explorer, things start to spiral out of control, and war between man and ape looks increasingly likely.
Dawn of The Planet of The Apes (a friend of mine criticised the title; too much ‘of the’s) is somewhat humourless and bleak, though not without a few pleasures (Andy Serkis). The CGI of course is amazing, as is Serkis’s performance, but if you’ve seen the first film the awe of seeing realistic talking apes with lifelike expressions is old. The strength and weakness of this film is the focus on the apes rather than the humans. It’s Caesar’s movie, and you empathise with him much more than any human. I don’t know if it’s intentional but the human characters are very underdeveloped; there’s a guy who wants to give the apes a chance and talk to them (good guy, has son and hat), a jerk who just hates apes and wants them all dead (bad guy, has stubble and gun) and Gary Oldman (bad guy, has Gary Oldman glasses and beard, doesn’t hate apes that much but wants to protect his people). Nobody has any discernable traits; it’s like they spent so much time on everything else they forgot to give the characters character, and seem to have turned up from some B movie, which wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t take itself so seriously.
It’s a dark film, with almost no laughs. This would be fine if the film wasn’t about monkeys, the funniest animals on the planet. There is one scene in which an ape is trying to steal weapons, and so pretends to be a normal, comedy style monkey, to the amusement of the humans he’s fooling. This would have been great, possibly the best part of the movie if I hadn’t seen an advert showing pretty much the whole scene on telly. Like most trailers, it spoilt the best and funniest part of an otherwise humourless film.
At over two hours though, it was never boring. The film is unique in that it focuses on a different species while managing the delicate balance of not anthropomorphising the apes too much, while keeping them relatable. It’s not like an animated film where you have animals with human brains; the apes are very apey; they have their own culture distinct from humans. The whole theme of the film though, is basically apes and people are the same, and there’s a lot you could read into it if you could be bothered. The visuals are amazing; CGI is in fact so good most of the time you don’t notice, apart from a few lingering monkey eyes close ups which serve more to show off motion capture technology than to say anything about the characters.
Dawn is unique and you have to take your hat off somewhat for it daring to focus on apes rather than humans. You then have to put it on again somewhat for the film taking itself so fucking seriously, and end up with a hat that’s just kind of resting on top of your head, and you look like a dick.
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