Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is now the eighth “Apes film,” the second film in the third franchise since 1968.  I list off the pedigree because I am feeling a slight sense of ape fatigue.  Though the film is tracking in the low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, my take on it is a little less enthusiastic – there’s nothing the film does incorrectly, but I do have a distinct sense of having seen all this before.

A decade after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, apes and humans live in isolation from each other.  The apes, led by Caesar (motion-captured by Andy Serkis), want to live in peace in a semi-civilized state; the humans, led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), want to reclaim a hydroelectric dam in the middle of ape territory.  While Malcolm (Jason Clarke) tries to broker a peace with the apes, Caesar faces a dissenting faction from within, led by his advisor Koba.

Rather than go toward the fantastical apocalypses provided by the Heston and Burton eras, Dawn continues in the realistic vein of its predecessor, with a marked focus on the verisimilitude of the special effects.  Assessing solely these visual effects, Dawn is a triumph; between the movements and the digitized facial expressions, it’s heroically easy to forget that you’re not watching real monkeys.  There’s rumbling about Serkis being up for an Oscar for his lead performance – well, I’m not sure about that, mostly because it’s hard for me to tell what’s Serkis and what’s an animator, but I do think he’s courting a well-deserved “Special Technical Achievement” award.

There’s a lot of other moving pieces in the film that are also successful, though they’re far outshined by the technical fakery.  Oldman and Clarke are compelling enough, though Oldman’s role is roughly equivalent to Bryan Cranston’s in Godzilla – he’s there for a plot mechanism, and you’ll probably leave the theater itching for more screen time from an actor as talented as he is.  But the slightly undercooked quality of the human characters really emphasizes the fact that this is first and foremost the primates’ show.

When it comes to the story, though, I’m not convinced that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is particularly visionary.  It is certainly more subtle than Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (an obvious inspiration) in that it isn’t reductionist in its approach to protagonist/antagonist relationships.  But once it does establish Koba and Dreyfus as antagonists of a sort, the film proceeds in a fairly predictable manner.  What ultimately emerges is a very unsurprising allegory about cooperation in spite of differences, open-mindedness on the subject of diversity.  Forgive me for saying, I’ve seen this movie several times already.

With a very different movie, I’d have spent a long time on the matter of the familiar plot, but in the case of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes this is less a misstep and more of a non-step.  The filmmakers don’t strike any false notes here; rather, the melody is quite familiar (no pun intended, though Michael Giacchino’s score does recall early Apes soundtracks).  The visual effects are the standout feature – the apes are strikingly rendered, the sequences in which they attack are appropriately terrifying, and the internecine struggles feel astoundingly human.  It’s not the second coming of science fiction, but it is a well-told iteration of a classic tale.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief strong language.”  There is some amount of blood seen, mostly during fights between apes.  Fight scenes between humans and apes proceed with more gunfire but with less blood; some of the scenes of attacking apes may be frightening for younger viewers.  The film also includes one F-bomb and several scatological S-bombs.

Pop back here on Thursday when The Cinema King tackles Transformers: Age of Extinction!