"Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" (I'm just going to refer to it as "Dawn of the Apes" henceforth) is set ten years after the events of "Rise of the Apes". Humanity is dwindling away following a global outbreak of the virus seen engineered in the first film, the apes have built their own community in the woods. It's been three years since they last saw any humans, but they aren't exactly upset about it. Caesar is still the leader of the group, and under his rule they've built a makeshift village with a school, housing, communal area, front door, more or less everything you'd expect from a human village. We see them communicating mostly through sign language, but there's also English writing at the school implying a grasp of the human language they've grown up around. Caesar now has a wife and a son, and though most of the apes still stand behind him there are some who are more hesitant.
When Caesar's son, Blue Eyes, and a friend are scouting the woods they come across a twitchy human. The friend is shot and the sound of the gun shot immediately attracts both the rest of the human group and the entirety of the ape village. Blah blah blah, story stuff, apes are pitted against humans and both sides must figure out what to do with the situation at hand. The remainder of the film takes a different route than what perhaps most blockbusters of this caliber might have taken. It's not about giant wars and fights, it's about the two main families - one human family and one ape family - and how they're living through it. It's a nice slower pace, a break from the films like Trans4mers, Godzilla, and the like where there's almost no sequence without some sort of giant action or character reveal. Most of "Dawn of the Apes" is about the characters, ape and human alike, how they think the world should work, how they feel about outsiders, and general interspecies politics. I would say, don't watch this if you're expecting a giant spectacle of a film. Because although there are spectacles in it, those are far from the main focus, and you might find yourself bored between them.
Before I watched this film I kept getting reviews through my feeds about how fantastic Andy Serkis was in it, how amazing the CG was, and the debate about giving acting Oscars to captured performances (a debate for another post) heated up again. I have to say, I disagree almost wholeheartedly. Serkis' performance was perhaps one of the weaker ones in the film, at least on the ape side. It may have been deliberate because he was amongst the first apes to get to such a high level of function, but he seems so much more human than the other apes. Toby Kebbell who portrayed Koba, Caesar's second in command, was much more impressive to me. He felt like an ape that was just slightly off. He felt more ape than human, more like an ape that that was transitioning to higher functioning rather than already being there. There were some apes that felt maybe a little too ape like again, like Maurice (the orangutan) who I sometimes actually forgot was supposed to be a near-equal to humans in brain capacity. But overall I felt that Serkis performance is far from worthy its praise.
Bottom line: If you liked "Rise of the Apes" you'll probably like "Dawn of the Apes". It neatly follows the story from the previous film without being overly reliant on it (could've possibly worked as a stand-alone with some minor rewrites). And if you didn't like "Rise of the Apes" you'll probably want to steer clear of this one. Like I said, it's more of the same. It's differently done, but it's still generally the same type of film.
No comments:
Post a Comment