Why The New Planet Of The Apes Movie Doesn't Suck

7 July 2014 | 5:23 pm | Staff Writer

It'll make you forget about that Tim Burton debacle... no, seriously

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes


 

The sly storytelling audaciousness of Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is currently staring at us from every bus-stop, every billboard, every placard on which its poster is plastered. The face of the second stanza in this ambitious reboot of everyone's favourite symbolic simians is not, this time around, James Franco, or some other similarly-statured star of bankable name and remarkable cheekbone. It is, instead, the face of Caesar, the Andy Serkis-styled CGI ape first introduced in 2011's Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Where that film was told from the human perspective - it, a tale of ambitious R&D, corporate greed, and the fragility of the mind - Dawn takes a radically different tack: this is a story that, from its opening reels, is mounted from the POV of chimpanzees.

From Pierre Boulle's original book through the original film franchise in the 1970s (let's pretend the 2001 Tim Burton debacle never actually happened), this tale of conquering apes has long held a mirror up to us naked apes; reflected humankind's recurring tendencies towards domination and subjugation amongst races and cultures; with the black chimps lording over the white humans in a grand subversion of colonialism's familiar colour-coding. That symbolism was wholly absent from Rise, which, instead, was tasked with inventing a genesis story from which a whole ongoing saga could sprawl out: a bio-engineered virus turning apes super-evolved whilst causing a pandemic outbreak amongst people. Following it, Dawn - the 'dark' installment, as per the standard Star Wars trilogy arc - tackles the tale at a fascinating juncture: the moment in alternate-world history in which man and simian are momentarily on the same footing.

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Prepare yourself for the greatest interpretive dance piece you've ever seen.

It begins with Caesar and ape tribe living a hunter-gatherer, subtitled-sign-language life in the Californian redwoods into which they were last seen fleeing. "10 winters" have passed since Franco ushered in a genetic apocalypse (which the Mayans may or may not have predicted), but the peaceful status-quo - Ape Shall Not Kill Ape, ho! - is about to be shattered. In what amounts to a First Contact meeting, the Apes come upon a rag-tag crew of people, who've ventured into the woods hoping to turn a nearby hydroelectric dam into an electricity-source for an enclave of survivors dwelling across the bay in downtown San Francisco. There's a standoff, threats of war, and then an uneasy, tentative peace eventually settled on; this dramatic arc evoking the familiar moves of frontier movies, in which the noble savages of the forest are suspicious of the white men bearing guns, who've come to their lands to use its resources.

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It's a set-up that, eventually leads to war; Caesar's oh-so-poignant name leading to a lot of Shakespearean palace intrigue amongst the apes, with his bellicose bonobo off-sider Koba (mo-cap'd by Toby Kebbell, who's otherwise made a career playing douchebags) agitating for both war and power. He's an institutionalised figure, traumatised from pre-pandemic years under lock-and-key; having once lived as lab-rat, he's learnt hatred from men, and wishes to repay it in kind. It's not all he's learned, either. In one of the film's best scenes, Koba shows the guile in his ambition, diffusing a stand-off with semi-automatic-wielding men by playing up a pantomime of the happy, fun-loving ape, shuckin' and jivin' with over-the-top, Every Which Way But smiles. Koba's character is, in short, the villainous simian, sure, but he's not treated with that shorthand, instead given great understanding; something that's mirrored by Gary Oldman's anti-ape politician, a man wracked by grief and fear, and never posited as rogue figure of greed or evil.

If the characterisations are surprisingly three-dimensional - even the most caricature-ish are afforded self-awareness; like when Kirk Acevedo says, aloud "okay, I'm the asshole” - what takes Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to a better-than-expected level isn't just the sympathy and sensitivity with which it treats its characters, the care it takes to making sure they matter to audiences when the inevitable conflict comes. The writing - by series rebooters Matt Jaffa and Amanda Silver, with Mark Bomback as final-draft hired-hand - may be good, but the direction borders on great. Matt Reeves made his name with 2008's excellent found-footage monster-movie, Cloverfield, and his Let The Right One In remake, 2010's Let Me In, showed the chops of a real filmmaker who happened to be working within genre.

"So, a chimpanzee walks into a bar..."

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is blessed with a brilliant directorial touch: Reeves holding takes when most tentpole blockbusters butcher scenes into a million fidgety edits; sustaining suspense in scene-after-scene, letting tension gradually mount over a 90-minute pre-battle build-up. There's touches of Hitchcock in his work, and not in a superficial way; the director echoing those eerie shots from The Birds when he has the apes materialise into frame, uncanny in their calm, terrifying the humans with their very presence. In one shot, when apes arise out of the woods as if like spirits, I was reminded of a striking shot from Claire Denis' White Material, a curious coincidence given it, too, was a film about society falling apart, a parable on colonialism that set out to capture that moment in which insurrection takes hold, and the fallout is horrifying, bloody, and inhuman.

It's a remarkable thought for a film that's, in its own way, remarkable. At its worst, this reborn Planet Of The Apes series could be just another lamentable piece of Hollywood product; a recognisable brand-name brought back with all the idiocy and explosions currently blighting the whole overbloated superheroverse. Instead, Dawn is a work notable, in the blockbuster landscape, for its sense of thoughtfulness, both in filmmaking and theme. Rather than squeezing cash out of the franchise name, the film furthers the work of its decades-ago predecessors, once again mounting a poignant parable; the darkness of man and the quirks of evolution explored by dramatising our closest genetic relatives.