Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)



Ten years after a pandemic disease, apes who have survived it are drawn into battle with a group of human survivors.  Short synopsis of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes taken from IMDb.com

So I kinda liked this film.  Which is funny, since I slept through it on my first attempt at viewing.  It was late, and I was tired, but I was going to try and watch it Saturday night around midnight-ish.  My, how times change.  When I was working night shift, I used to not start getting tired until around 3 AM or so.  Now I can't make it until... let me see, I lost track of the film's events somewhere around the twenty minute mark, so that'd be 12:20 or so.  Or earlier.  It wasn't later, as it wasn't THAT late when I awoke to the DVD menu music endlessly looping over and over, and stumbled upstairs to bed.  I watched it the next day from where I had lost track.

OK, now that you've heard that tirade on my sleeping habits, how about some reviewing?  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes wasn't bad.  We've got the survivors, from both human and ape sides, of another semi-stereotypical pandemic that has all but wiped out the world's human population.  I say "semi-stereotypical" because pandemics are all the thing these days.  That and zombies.  What ever happened to good old-fashioned nuclear war?  I suppose today's movie-going audience doesn't think that is as likely as a big disease killing us all off.

Nuclear war a thing of the past?  Probably not.  Just this week, the Soviet Unio- err, Russians, I mean, announced testing for a new intercontinental ballistic missile to replace the NATO-designated SS-18 "Satan" (pictured above). / Source: forum.sisak.info 

Anyway, the disease is only of the "semi" family of stereotypicalness because in this case, the virus is spread by apes, who have been exposed to a new medication that was targeted at treating Alzheimers, but instead makes the apes radically more intelligent (in the previous film this all happened, which film I also liked for the most part, by the way).  Now that we've got our back-story down (much of this is recapped in the film's opening credit sequence), we start the film with Caesar, the first of the evolved apes, who is leading his people in the fairly mundane existence of living.  Mundane for apes, at least.  The apes quickly encounter some humans, who are on their way into the heart of the ape enclave to try and restart the hydroelectric power plant above San Francisco. 

Coincidentally, this is the second film in as many weeks that I've viewed that had to do with San Fran'.  Is that just a scenic spot for film settings, or what?  We couldn't set this movie in... I don't know...  Seattle?  Or maybe Canada?  Or how about Cuba?  And if we needed bridges, there are some semi-scenic ones on the Eastern U.S. coast.  Or a few places in between.  California even boasts a few nice ones besides the Golden Gate.  If you've read much of my stuff, you know I get annoyed with films that are set in what is becoming rather prosaic surroundings.  Let's set our film in someplace people don't go often.  Like maybe Grand Junction, Colorado?  Or even Bowling Green, Kentucky?  Or maybe Aberdeen, South Dakota?  Hollywood, please no more Washington D.C., New York City, or any of the major cities in metropolitan Cali as settings, OK?

A bit of humor from one of the original series.  I wonder if most people who watch these modern flicks realize that the Planet of the Apes series was doing the sequel-it-til-it-stops-breathing thing throughout the 1970s.  Sure, we had Chuck Heston in 1968's landmark Planet of the Apes (which is, in this reviewer's opinion, still way better than Tim Burton's clumsy remake of 2001), in which he delivers those now famous lines: "Take your stinkin paws off me, you damn dirty ape!," and the unforgettable, "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" / Source: comicbookmovie.com

So where was I again?  Ah yes, the movie.  The apes drive the humans away by show of force, and then decide to go down to the human enclave in the city and warn them not to come back.  This leads to tensions, because the humans need the power plant in order to power their needs, and their fuel supplies for portable generators is dwindling.  So some guy, whose name I never caught, but who plays lead in the film, leads a small group back up to the apes camp to beg for access to the electric plant.   Oh yeah, this is going to turn out happily, right?

Now humans and apes are not on good standing terms, since apes fought back when humans tried to subdue them in the last film, and since it was the "Simian flu" that wiped out most of humanity, everybody is not surprisingly really tense at this point.  But Caesar decides to trust the humans and let them try to power up their lives again.  He is opposed by Koba, another ape who was experimented upon in a lab, and is very resentful of it.  This guy, err- APE, is one to watch in the film, as he's gonna be important.


Everything you ever wanted to know about Planet of the Apes, but were afraid to ask.

Anyway, things deteriorate, and even though our intrepid band of people eventually manages to turn the power back on, the apes attack the human enclave in the city and start a war with the humans.  They do this by stealing guns from a local armory that the humans are preparing for their own defense, and then make an assault on the humans' fortress-like retreat.  Things devolve into a CGI and gasoline explosions extravaganza at this point, but for myself, I was pleased to see that throughout most of Dawn, the filmmakers have managed to use both cutting edge graphics and a subject matter that humans won't be as repulsed to see in almost point perfect CGI as they are of themselves.  The apes look real, but yet not real, but still not in a "uncanny valley" real/unreal (see this link for the definition of Uncanny Valley).  They are pretty impressive representations of their real-world likenesses, I thought.  Not cheesy like the ape costumes of the 1970s Planet of the Apes films, nor excellent makeup effects but still a bit silly like the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes.  No, these ones look...  well I can't explain it, but its more convincing than it has been in the past.

Of course, we have to throw in some human emotions and behaviors that apes probably wouldn't display.  I can't think of a specific instance to gripe about, but I do recall thinking some of the dialogue for the apes, especially near the end, was a bit overdone.  Sure, they are hyper-evolved, but that doesn't mean they are human beings, and some of the things said seem as if they are suited to ring sympathetic to human ears, rather than be true to where apes actually come from.  The point is that these apes have evolved into something new, and with that evolution comes some uncomfortable human-like behaviors, such as jealousy and intrigue.  Our ape Koba features prominently here, to give away that detail.  A show-down is a brewin'.

And to top Dawn off, we have an, in my opinion, an almost unnecessary blow-up-the-building-because-we-had-money-in-the-budget set-piece explosion near the end.  Silly, I thought.  The tension is high enough.  We didn't need it.  Apes and humans can't get along.  We get the point.  And yes, some humans and some apes can get along.  We get the point.  Blowing up Gary "I'm saving the human race" Oldman didn't really do anything for me on an emotional level.

Yes, it's from the last film and not Dawn.  But it's still funny in an intellectual sort of way. / Source: pandasthumb.org

Having said all that, I didn't hate this film.  It wasn't as good in premise as the last Apes film (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), but it was nowhere near as bad as 2001's remake.  I thought the plot stayed true to itself, and that the characters, for what they did, got the ideas across pretty well.  There weren't many high marquee stars here, but everybody seemed to play their part for what it was worth.  And the action, though heavy in the CGI and explosions factor as I have stated, didn't seem gratuitous for gratuitousness sake either.  When our villain ape leads a charge on horseback against the human citadel, bearing assault rifles in both "damn dirty paws" (had to throw that in there), we can really feel that he is rallying his forces, who had been getting pounded up until this moment.  This isn't just pretty fireworks, for the most part (end-of-film-building-demolishment aside, that is).  This is life of death combat between two species.

The conflicting emotions evinced by the apes was also especially intriguing.  It is easy to dismiss a film like Avatar for being too preachy when it uses alien beings who conveniently fit the model of "poor picked-on natives," when we want to make a point about how evil colonialism and mercantilism and imperialism is.  It is something else entirely when we face beings who we have an actual conflict with on this world of ours.  Humans have traditionally treated other species we share the Earth with in deplorable ways.  What if a higher species on the scale, like say... apes, was able to... well, rise up and fight back on our level?  What if they could evince emotions the same way we do, and live in such a way as to be recognizable as a sovereign nation unto themselves?  Some would say they do right now, but until we can communicate with apes as we do with other nation states, nobody is going to pull up a chair at the UN for them.  Call that human conceit if you wish, but it is the bare truth.

I think we've got our next sequel lined up.  Although I've never seen "Mafia" spelled that way.  Maybe it's an Ape thing. / Source: motifake.com

Just the same, the apes in the film do fit those models.  And so watching them deal with issues that we can relate to ...  it's pretty interesting stuff, even if it is dumbed down for a psuedo-action flick.  In the end, I'd say Dawn walks a fine tight rope between overly sentimental and overly summer blockbuster-ish, and though it leans heavily on the blockbuster side of the equation, it's smarter than many such films of late.  I'd watch it over the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  In fact, given the choice between the two in the Redbox cue, I have done just that.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes contains action, violence, some minor language (though I confess I missed any strong swearing in it, if it was there) and themes that are better for philosophical debate than for a summer action flick.  I thought it worth the buck and a half from Redbox, and would recommend it over some of the other options available right now.


The parting comment:

I suggest ending this before the very end (I suggest closing it at 1 minute and 45 seconds myself, but it's up to you), where the boy in the video makes an inappropriate comment.  However, as far as cuts of "Planet of the Apes: The Musical" go, this is the best one I found.


R.I.P. Phil Hartman/Troy McClure.  One of my favorite Simpsons characters.