By Keri O’Shea
Planet of the Apes remains one of my favourite films, a post-apocalyptic movie which only reveals itself as such in its closing reels. It’s a cinematic moment which retains a hell of a lot of its original impact too, even though it’s now familiar enough for us to poke fun at (Family Guy do it brilliantly, to be fair). I also have a lot of time for the other Planet of the Apes films which followed it in the original franchise, even though you needed more patience in their case, and you had to be prepared to overlook a lot of their problems. Still, for all of my love for these films, I was initially very skeptical of the resurrection of the Apes franchise for the first of the prequels, and it took me a while to get around to seeing it. I’m not sure why that is, other than a general pessimism. I tend to expect the worst from prequels generally, and when they crop up around films I give a shit about, I always fret that they’re going to be crass, trite or Hollywood lazy – but I actually liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes a lot. It more than matched the tremendous bleakness of the original films and ramped it up for modern audiences. The second prequel continues very much in this vein, though is perhaps more of an action flick, and not quite – quite – as smart.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes gets through a synopsis of events very quickly as its opening credits roll: it picks up directly where the last film left off, providing us with the (predictable but functional) premise that shortly after super-ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) led the rest of the apes to freedom, humanity succumbed to the deadly virus which came out of the same research facility as Caesar did. This fact meant that those who were left were forced to forget about the intelligent apes presumably still living on the outskirts of San Francisco; ten years have passed. The apes, now living in a small and functional community in the woods, assume that all the humans are dead. However, this is not the case, and when they encounter a small group of people who are looking to gain access to the nearby dam, one of their number is shot and killed.
Caesar, who grew up with humans, initially tells the humans to leave if they wish to avoid war – but tends to be conciliatory towards them, eventually allowing them into the dam so that they can try to generate the electricity they so badly need. His policy causes rifts to develop in the ape community, and the more contact they have with humans, the more the situation escalates – particularly as the once-abused Koba seems to want to pre-emptively take the conflict to Man.
At first, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes seems as though it is going to be a very black-and-white affair, truth be told: we are shown that humans are trigger-happy shits from the outset, and the apes are the bastions of tolerance. Happily, this approach doesn’t last too long and the picture becomes more complex – but what is unusual about this film is how entirely it is the apes’ movie. The film’s human characters – even the superb Gary Oldman – are more or less sidelined in favour of following Caesar and his group, and get very little screen-time. The CGI showcased in this film is now of the standard to allow this to feel not only completely natural, but completely plausible. We spend most of the time developing relationships with characters who aren’t ‘there’ in any conventional sense (which must have been a peculiar set of challenges for the actors working on this film) but not only does it work well, but it even results in some very emotive scenes. Andy Serkis’s career has been an odd one, in many ways – he’s a successful actor who is always digitised into someone or something else completely, but his stint as the green-screen guy here results in a strangely sensitive performance as Caesar, even though I don’t feel completely clear on how much of it is him and how much of it is something else. Not that it particularly matters…
The capabilities of the CGI are also used here to create a very ambitious, high action film which differs a great deal in this respect from the more studied, sober Rise (with the exception of the final scenes there, perhaps); Dawn is a different beast, if you’ll pardon the expression, with large numbers of both apes and humans, and large-scale battles featuring throughout; it opts for lengthy fight scenes, sometimes seemingly at the expense of pausing to reflect on some of the finer points in the plot. Whilst it’s definitely an enjoyable, engaging film, on occasion I wish it would slow down, but, as I think we’ve established, this film goes for a bigger/faster/more approach – it’s a summer blockbuster, really speaking, although I don’t wish to assert that in this, it’s a mindless film: it certainly is not.
Still, in sticking with that approach it makes some mistakes; my main quibble with the film is in its handling of the whole firearms thing. For starters, in places it feels like a rather heavy-handed sermon on the evils of guns; everyone who owns one or uses one is invariably a coward or a twat, and guns are quite straightforwardly represented as the One Corrupting Influence, changing things for the worse every time they come into play. Then, there’s the way in which the apes pick them up and seem able to use them perfectly well! (Maybe that’s why those parents who complained that their children saw the film’s trailer were concerned about the believability.) I was also not quite sold on the ten-year isolationism of both humans and apes. Still, such are the perils of opting to make a film in which all events seems designed to lead us up to full scale war – some things inevitably fall by the wayside.
So, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has a different tone and focus to the previous film, true, but it does still feel like a highly successful addition to the new franchise. It’s still very engaging and yes, moving in places, and when it is showing us all-out conflict, it’s a marvel of modern technology. One thing’s for certain however – at the end of the film, it’s clearly wide open for another chapter to follow, and so the franchise seems to be back for the long haul. There’s still much to explain and explore. Though who knows what they’ll find to call it…