Here is my take on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts — pros, cons, yays, nays, new series rankings, whatever — in the comments section. In other words: have at it, nerds.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt’s smart and involving revival of the long-dormant Planet of the Apes franchise, ended on such a note of triumph that it was easy for both casual and committed fans the series to forget how uncharacteristic this was for an Apes movie. Rise had its moments of sadness and loss, of course, both human and animal, and its end-credit map of how simian flu spread across the globe offered foreboding for the next chapter. But its climactic sequences of Apes running wild approximated a bigger, more fun version of the violent outbreak that closed Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, its closest relative in the previous series. The apes weren’t out to kill all humans; they just caused some beautifully shot mayhem in the name of ape freedom. Their endgame was a forest settlement to call their own; the destruction (mostly non-lethal) was just collateral damage.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes keeps the collateral damage, loses the triumph — which makes it a clear successor to the original films.
It picks up ten years after the end of Rise, after the simian flu has decimated humanity. Caesar (Any Serkis and a bunch of animators) now leads a massive ape tribe in the Redwood Forest outside of San Francisco. Humans maintain an outpost in the city, but they’ve lost power. A dam-based generator in the forest could really help them out, so despite a few flares in human-ape tensions, they send a team, including trigger-happy anti-ape hothead who is supposedly the only guy who knows how to power up the dam, over to ape camp to call a truce.
The team includes a makeshift family in the form of Malcolm (Jason Clarke), his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and Malcolm’s special lady friend Ellie (Keri Russell). They’re all ape-friendly, though they aren’t as well-drawn as James Franco or John Lithgow from the previous film. Caesar has a family of his own, including Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston), his teenage son, and a newborn with Cornelia (Judy Greer, motion-capping her part either out of sheer fandom or hoping for some action in a future sequel, as she gets almost nothing here). He’s cautiously open to contact with humans, while his associate Koba (Toby Kebbell), less fond of the human race, glowers.
As human-ape tensions simmer, the plot mechanics take on a sense of inevitability: there will be misunderstandings fraying the ties between the races, and if both Koba and the character played by Gary Oldman seems like they’re itching for a human-ape conflict, well, it’s not going to be a Statue of Liberty-sized twist when it breaks out. But Matt Reeves, taking over for Wyatt, must know that one key to making a Planet of the Apes film is taking things a little bit further than the audience might expect; along with screenwriters Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver, he locates surprising details in a story that, in its broad outlines, telegraphs where it’s going from early on.
These details start with the ape performances, which are remarkable. If the humans are more respectable and sometimes underused supporting players, it doesn’t much matter because Andy Serkis, the other mo-cap actors, and the effects team have created some of the most lifelike CG characters in the history of the medium. So many CG creations look subtly over-animated, as if afraid that any rest will immediately look like a 2D cartoon. Serkis and his team are more comfortable with stillness; Caesar, with his developing rasp of a voice, wields a quiet sort of power.
With all of the CG apes, costs have to be cut somewhere, and Twentieth Century Fox is notorious in some attentive film-geek circles for shooting productions in Vancouver, randomly assigning genre stories foresty environments for budgetary reasons (this is especially prevalent in their comics adaptations: remember how Elektra, the movie about ninja assassins, takes place largely around a log cabin? Or how X-Men: The Last Stand has the bad mutants hiding out in a forest for a stretch?). But like the opening section of last summer’s The Wolverine, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes makes evocative use of the Fox Forest. Reeves has a painterly eye, and his images of mayhem avoid the disaster-porn money shots of collapsing skyscrapers and (despite an eye-catching poster image) falling bridges. He uses use dark skies, big swaths of fire, and the potentially awesome/ridiculous site of gun-toting apes on horseback to create battle sequences that look like dueling pulp paperback covers. He’s fond of fixing his camera: there are steady, umoving shots of swaths of apes staring down the humans, and in his most bravura moment the camera is bolted the top of an out-of-control tank as it careers through battle (this is becoming his signature move; a similar technique was the star of the most memorable bit of Let Me In, his American remake of Let the Right One In).
In classic Planet of the Apes fashion, real tension lurks beneath the sci-fi coolness of a human-apes battle royale; unlike Rise, there isn’t a clear side to root for so much as characters you hope don’t get caught in the crossfire. Though only the ape characters recur, Dawn is very much a follow-up to Rise. If the first film was about Caesar’s radicalization, the second is about the corruption of that ideal, and whether the drive to fuck things up away from peace is just human nature — or maybe nature in general.
Though the ten-year time jump between movies is promising, I hope future Apes movies will push further forward, both in time and creativity. Rise of the Planet the Apes found such life and detail in tracking Caesar’s early life that it avoided the drudgery of a pointless origin story. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, as strong as it is, nudges the new series more toward prequel territory, the kind of permanent teeing-up that has diluted the otherwise strong new takes on James Bond and Star Trek. If we’re going to follow a long, three-to-five-film road to the Planet of the Apes everyone knows, I hope Reeves and company take the opportunity for some unforeseen detours.
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Ditto on that last point. I know the emotional story of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has to with what you’ll do to protect family, the bigger conflict is about how human/ape tensions can tip over into violence and escalate quickly — which is pretty much the same as the last one. Which is fine, but I enjoy this ape world so much, I want to spend time in it without really having to think about war/violence/battles, since that ground has been covered by the Rise and Dawn. Basically, I’m hoping for an Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
SPOILERS PROBABLY
I agree that this seems to be another series that falls into the modern “permanent teeing-up” category, particularly after seeing interviews with Matt Reeves where he talks about the original Planet as being kind of the destination this new series is heading for (though to be fair, that movie takes place 2000 years in the future AND we’ve already run out of original-series movie to pattern sequels on, so they should have plenty of freedom in what kind of story to tell next). And I’m wary of the possibility that the next movie could be a war movie in a ruined San Francisco (although after Dawn, I’m much more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they could come up with an interesting/sensitive angle that might keep it from feeling repetitive).
But I’d be interested in hearing more about your take on Rise’s story and its similarities to Dawn’s, because I’m not sure I see it. I didn’t really read Rise as being about “how human/ape tensions can tip over into violence and escalate quickly,” beyond the basic fact that both films feature apes attacking humans. Because I think Jesse’s description is apt: “the first film was about Caesar’s radicalization” AND that the “apes weren’t out to kill all humans; they just caused some beautifully shot mayhem in the name of ape freedom.” Caesar wants a peaceful separation and explicitly keeps the apes from killing people more than once, and each step of their rampage is actually just a reaction to the humans’ attempts to stop their escape. That makes the action climax of Rise exhilarating; we’re really on the apes side for that one! By contrast, the mid-film ape rampage in Dawn is horrifying with, as Jesse mentions, “[no] clear side to root for so much as characters you hope don’t get caught in the crossfire.” And the climactic action in this entry isn’t even ape vs. human, it’s ape vs. ape. Maybe I’m just getting defensive because one of the things I really liked about this movie was how different it was from Rise, but I am curious to hear what you thought was the same as the last one.
(More spoilers below.)
You’re right that it’s more of a superficial similarity–it really is that the result of the actions on both the ape side and the human side result in a big, grand APE ATTACK.
Which, you’re right, was exhilarating in Rise, and did feel triumphant for all the reasons you described.
But for Dawn, which I did like, it was less enjoyable, also for reasons you describe. There’s less of a clear rooting interest, except to be anti-Koba. But, more than that, the novelty kind of wore off for me. Seeing the apes in Rise pull apart zoo cages and use them as spears was a little silly, but it was pretty exciting. Watching apes shoot guns at people is less inventive, and less exciting because we’ve already seen what apes on a rampage can do at the end of Rise. It was fun when Koba jumped into the tank, but I feel like the climax of Rise had a million little moments like that (them all on the trolley car!), and Dawn had fewer that already had less of an impact because of Rise. The big ape escape in Rise is exhilarating, while in Dawn it was more wearying. It’s not that I didn’t like Dawn, but I’m hoping the next one does something different.
SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING
Days later I’m still thinking about that last moment between Caesar and Koba. It’s something of a cliche (will the hero save the villain?) but it’s a cliche that almost always works for me, and this story (and the way it resolves) really lends it more moral gravity and emotion than these kinds of films can often muster for that moment. I still don’t know if I can think of a “better” solution (at least from a practical sense), but that sense of being boxed into a corner doesn’t reduce the way Caesar’s action (and the line he says as he does it) feels like a huge failure. He’s now the unchallenged leader of his tribe, but he’s going to have to fight Koba’s war anyway and he’s broken his first big rule & compromised the moral purity of his society (and even resorted to Koba-like rhetoric to justify it). I also really like the way the falling death echoes Koba’s murder of Ash AND the moment at the end of Rise where Caesar lets Koba do the same thing to the human Jacobs (as well as the similar situation between Caesar and Aldo in Battle, though Dawn’s Caesar more directly has blood on his hands in this scene). Still, that moment has kind of haunted me. As much as I’d like to think I’d be like Captain America refusing to fight Bucky, or Captain Kirk offering Nero assistance near the black hole (maybe the Star Trek-iest moment in that movie), I find it so easy to imagine doing the same thing as Caesar and taking advantage of Koba’s peril to quickly solve the problem.
NEXT MOVIE ON THE PLANET OF THE APES SPECULATION
(PROBABLY SPOILERS FOR DAWN HERE TOO)
What do you guys dream of seeing in the next installment? Or other future installments? They’ve kind of run to the end of the road in terms of stories the original series did, so they’ve kind of got a wide open field ahead of them. The end of Dawn certainly seems to set up the possibility of a straight up war film to follow this one. But as Jesse and Marisa already mentioned, that runs the risk of just feeling like the bigger version of this film. And I think it might be even more important to change up the environment from post-apocalyptic San Francisco, just to maintain the variety they’ve got going (and to live up to the variety of the original series, which was really different each time out). I know it’s probably too much to ask for sequels to be as tonally different and weird as the sequels to the original movie, but I’d certainly welcome some weirdness if they had a good take on it. Maybe vehicles arrive in response to Dreyfus’s call for help in Dawn and they’re manned by apes? Maybe apes that, due to ALZ 113 and mumbo jumbo about radiation (from either a ruined power plant or a bomb going off somewhere else in the country) are the ape equivalent of the mutants from Beneath!? Or maybe introduce the Alpha Omega doomsday cult from the tie-in novel (itself also a reference to Beneath) and do something nutty with that? Or, since time travel seems like the wrong way to go at this point in the series, maybe you could take care of the war stuff at the beginning or ending of the movie and devote more of it to the apes cleaning up San Francisco & assuming some of human civilization (kind of a way to give Marisa some of that Escape feeling…domestic comedy, ape fashion shows, etc.)?
Even though Reeves’s comments about his interest in telling stories that suggest how the world of the original Planet came to be suggest that Fox (or at least Reeves, I guess) can envision many future installments to bridge that gap, it seems easy enough to me to imagine a third film being kind of the trilogy conclusion for Caesar’s story. Studios like trilogies, they’ve already got stories about Caesar as baby-to-youth-to-young-revolutionary and Caesar as grown-up-leader-of-apes dealing with the responsibility that entails, so maybe follow up with the Old Ape Caesar notion I mentioned on Friday? Set it twenty or thirty years later, another couple of generations have come up, the war with humanity was fought and won, humans are treated like beasts, ape civilization has really noticeably progressed/anthropomorphized and maybe now Old Caesar isn’t really suited for the world he built.
I wouldn’t object to seeing Malcolm, Ellie and Alexander again (I liked them…though maybe that means I should object to seeing them again, since we know what happens to characters we like in an Apes movie if they stick around long enough), but I also like the idea of switching up the human cast between installments. And I’d also be in favor of jumping ahead at some point (probably not at the beginning of the third movie, but even a mid-movie jump could be thrilling) and having Andy Serkis playing his own descendant, in the tradition of Roddy McDowall.