The original Planet of the Apes flicks was my early journey into the world of science fiction. It also was my first look into a dystopian society. It instantly caught my imagination, so it’s no surprise that when Rise of Planet of the Apes came out, I was more then a little excited. With this much-deserved sequel, we are given the second of the rebooted Planet of the Apes movies, titled Dawn of Planet of the Apes. Promising to continue the events from Rise, it seemed that Dawn could do no wrong. How does Dawn compare to Rise? Is this the Apes sequel you’ve been waiting for?
Story
Dawn of Planet of the Apes takes place after the events of Rise. Haven’t seen Rise? Okay, brief summary: humans make an Alzheimer’s drug and test on it on Chimps, who become smarter and get a wicked green highlight in their eyes. During this trail stage, one of the chimps goes crazy and scares the shareholders into stopping the project and euthanizing all the test subjects. Little did they know, the Chimp was pregnant. Not wanting to euthanize the Chimp baby, our main character, played by James Franco, takes him home, names him Caesar, and begins teaching him. As it turns out, doubling the dose actually makes the Chimps even smarter, but it also creates a killer virus that effects humans: the Simian Virus. Apes and Chimps break out and book it to the San Francisco Redwood Forest, all led by Caesar. I skipped all the best parts of the flick, so please go watch it.
Dawn opens up with a brief summary of the Simian virus, showing a world map and its effect on humanity’s population. Safe to say it’s pretty bad; humanity’s numbers have dwindled and all of society as we know it has collapsed.
The basic plot of Dawn of Planet of the Apes revolves around San Francisco, where we have a rag tag team of Humans who happen to be traveling through the Redwood forest when they run into the Apes.
Okay let’s pause here: I’m going to be using a lot of Walking Dead terminology in this review, as that was the only thing I could think of while watching this flick. Replace Zombies with Apes and you get the picture.
Okay back to our rag tag team of plucky humans. There is always the A-hole character (Shane) who shoots first and asks questions later. He pulls his gun, of course, and shoots one of the Apes. The Apes aren’t too pleased, and neither is Caesar. They have a confrontation where Caesar says “HUMANS LEAVE!” Freaked out, especially since they heard the Apes talk, the humans run back to their stronghold, where it’s revealed that the whole reason the Humans were up in the Redwoods in the first place was because of a dam that could be used to generate electricity.
The Apes march down and show their strength to the Humans, which of course sets them into a frenzy. Essentially, the Humans will go to war over the dam. With no other choice, our main character, who is essentially Rick Grimes (Walking Dead), treks back to ask Caesar for help. Which of course starts problems within the Ape ranks, as they don’t trust Humans. Caesar allows them to work on the dam, and all seems happy until the inevitable happens.
Now, I’m not going to spoil the fun, but Apes and Humans finally have their clash, and it’s pretty dang epic.
Thoughts
I’ll be honest, I was really looking forward to hitting up this flick. More so then I thought I would be. After seeing it though, I don’t know, it’s tough to say. The movie on a whole is pretty decent, but not anywhere near as good as Rise of Planet of the Apes. That being said, it isn’t a bad movie by any means. I think the problem though is both its pacing and characters. I honestly couldn’t care less about any of the Humans, and thought the Apes were the most fascinating bunch. What was really distracting was the humans all resembled characters from the Walking Dead. The mains lead, Jason Clarke, felt like he was doing a Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) impression throughout the movie. None of the other humans really stood out enough to make you truly feel sorry for them. The film also features actor Gary Oldman, who by all accounts is an amazing actor. However, the character he played felt very boring, which was clearly not his fault. He still acts well, and even brings you to tears in one scene.
All the CG and VFX were absolutely stunning, and Caesar as played by Andy Serkis (Gollum) was just amazing! There were plenty of close-ups that really showed off the CG, which was amusing to watch as all the Apes out-acted their Human counterparts, especially with any of the scenes featuring Ceasar and Koba. In the previous film, Koba had a very unique look that was quite scary. With the CG being what it was, Koba looked wicked.
The only other issue I had was that the movie felt a little long. Certainly not a Michael Bay type of long, but the pacing felt off. At times the scenes that should be the most compelling were rushed to get to more action.
Overall
If you are a huge Planet of the Apes fan, I’m sure you won’t be too disappointed. The movie is far from a bad movie, it just didn’t live up to Rise in my opinion, though there is plenty to look at in this film. All the VFX is amazing, especially with all the backdrops of the Redwoods. I feel like Dawn should’ve taken a more Godzilla approach and focused more on characters and less on battles.