The second movie in the reboot series is emotional and action-packed
Next up in my ‘Apes’ miniseries as I prepare myself for this year’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), the second movie in the reboot series. A common opinion online seems to be that Rise, a slightly all-over-the-place movie that I nevertheless really enjoyed, is the worst of the lot, and that the series only gets better from there, so I was really excited to see this one.
The movie picks up quite literally where Rise left off, with an infographic of a map of the world tracking the spread of the ‘Simian Flu’ which wipes out 98% of humanity, only unlike the infographic in Rise’s credits, this one has soundbites and news clips to add to the effect!
Revolutionary, it is not, and I do think that skipping a movie charting the collapse of human society from Caesar’s point of view might be a missed opportunity, but I get it. It’s cleaner to do an infographic you’ve seen a thousand times and cut to ten years later. I guess I’m just a little curious about how Caesar handled things during that time.
Apes Together Strong
It has been a decade since human society collapsed and Caesar and his apes are thriving. They communicate in a mixture of sign language and words; they hunt together; they educate their young; they make art. We’ll get to the inciting incident, but I want to take a moment here to highlight the design of the ape living spaces, art, and physical worldbuilding here, because it’s very impressive.
It can’t have been easy to create a colony like this that feels real and lived-in, but the filmmakers did an amazing job. The apes’ home feels in every way like something that super-smart apes would build, which I think must’ve been a deceptively tricky task.
Anyways, it had to happen eventually: humans stumble across some apes in the woods and things get tense immediately. The humans are looking to fix a dam in the woods to restore power to the city which they’ve started to reconstruct; the apes don’t want the humans and their guns anywhere near them. Caesar (Andy Serkis), who now has a family and is the apes’ leader, has to decide the best course of action.
Humans Together... Fine
On the human side of things, we have Jason Clarke and Keri Russell as our partnered-up protagonists, Malcolm and Ellie. Gary Oldman also channels his Commissioner Gordon for the role of Dreyfuss—leader of the human survivors—but Clarke and Russell are doing most of the interacting with the apes.
In terms of development, these aren’t much more complex characters than Will (James Franco) was in Rise, but they’re given more to do, and their family dynamic (Malcolm also has a teenage son) is used thematically as a point of contrast/similarity with Caesar’s family, which adds a bit of depth to things. None of them ever quite reach the level of connection that Will had with Caesar in Rise, but their presence is appreciated.
Obviously, the heart and soul of this movie is Caesar. He has a new-born son and a sick mate and is faced with opposition from his eldest son and a scarred ape called Koba (who I thought was going to be an antagonist to Caesar in the last movie and was baffled when I was proven wrong). This on top of the encroaching humans and things never really let up for Caesar.
He’s often put in positions where there’s no right answer and watching him be pushed into making reluctant decisions makes for fascinating viewing.
Dawn of my Awareness That These Movies Rule
There’s also a surprising amount of emotional depth here. Caesar’s son, Blue Eyes, goes on quite a journey, and Caesar reminiscing on the man who raised him actually brought me close to tears. There is a powerful undercurrent of legacy, family, and home running through these movies—the kinds of themes that can touch almost anyone in a meaningful way. To an outsider, these seem like corny talking-monkey movies, but anyone actually engaging with them will doubtless find themselves really feeling for Caesar and his friends.
I was also pleasantly surprised by Rise’s ending, which is almost something of a cliffhanger leading directly into War of the Planet of the Apes. The somewhat bitter tone and the way that not every character gets a happy ending really worked for me, and I’m immensely glad that I have not one, but two, Apes movies to look forward to in the coming days because this has quickly become one of my favourite series to date.
***
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