The catchily titled Rise of the Planet of Apes merged fantastic SFX and a strong story to become great. Motivations were clear, whilst James Franco wasn’t annoying! The mix of performance capture and CGI gave Caesar and co unseen levels of life.
‘Dawn’ continues this trend. Caesar, Koba and Blue Eyes in particular are fantastic, their respective actors making even the underused Gary Oldman look dull in comparison. Large parts of the film contain purely ape to ape moments. They live, love, teach and argue; I could have watched an entire movie of that. Maybe that would have been stronger as the humans don’t do anything half as interesting.
I want to love this film. For it’s technological achievements alone it deserves all the praise it’s getting and more. The problem is…what does it really say? We know that the apes and the humans aren’t going to magically patch up their differences, or there wouldn’t be more films, much less a link from these films to the original. The problem with prequels is inevitability. Rise gave us something we’d not seen before, but Dawn is marching ever closer to what we know.
Maybe Dawn could overcome the inevitability? It nearly does via some touching and interesting scenes of the apes and their own civilisation, juxtaposed against the humans and their plight. Mistrust and self-destructive tendencies don’t confine themselves to humans it seems. The emotions on display are strong and heartfelt.
Jaw-dropping visuals and great performances can’t turn this into a great movie on their own though. As it stands it’s merely a good one. The apes rule this film. It’s a shame the humans weren’t given the same chance to shine. But they aren’t mentioned in the title.
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