The end result plays like a cranked-up simian riposte to the French-Canadian film Quest for Fire, or an alternative-universe extension of the "dawn of man" sequence from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which went head to head with the original Planet of the Apes in 1968. This latest reboot, which quotes directly from Battle, revels in the opportunity to make the homo-sapiens the secondary species.
Remember, it took the original series three movies before we really began to see the world through other than human eyes.
While the "native 3D" remains a take-it-or-leave-it addition (the best I can say is that it bothered me less than usual), the organic scope of the digitised character creation is breathtaking, using the technology to tell the story from the point of view of the apes, who remain the primary focus of the narrative. Shot largely on location in the forests of Vancouver, Dawn benefits greatly from capturing the actors' performances in the wild. And when the battles come, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves (who inherited the project from Wyatt) handles the action sequences with aplomb, keeping his eye on character even as grand spectacle reigns – the key to maintaining an element of dizzying danger. While Serkis remains the king of the cinematic swingers (his Kong and Caesar both rule), Kebbell gives him a run for his money as the scarred survivor of an experimentation lab, threatening to steal the show from the maestro as his character launches a Lucifer-like rebellion against his lord and master. Facing ancient foe, both men and monkeys are torn between the desire to co-operate and the urge to obliterate, the alarums of war booming ominously in the background.Ĭarefully balancing its sympathies, Dawn establishes mirror-image figures on both sides of the species divide: in the peace camp, Caesar, Cornelia (Judy Greer) and troubled son Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston) are matched by neo-nuclear human family unit Malcolm (Jason Clarke), Ellie (Keri Russell) and Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in the war room, Gary Oldman's militaristic Dreyfus is the human counterpoint for embittered bonobo Koba (Toby Kebbell). Believing the humans to have died out (a "simian flu" pandemic provided an apocalyptic footnote to Rise), the 2,000-odd gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans live a peaceful and prosperous existence until a chance encounter with a group of virus-resistant survivors provokes trigger-happy tragedy. In the original film series, a time-travel loop was required to teach apes to say "No" in Rise, bio-engineered science did the trick, the search for a cure for Alzheimer's becoming the accidental catalyst for a simian revolution.ĭawn picks up the story 10 years after the end of Rise, with Caesar (a brilliant Andy Serkis, once again performance-captured by the wizards at Weta Digital) and his comrades building a community in Muir Woods following the ravaging of San Francisco.
It took British director Rupert Wyatt to get things back on track with his 2011 reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, using eye-catching performance-capture technology in service of a solid script (by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) that married the political clout of Conquest with the animal-rights themes of Boulle's source. Tim Burton's stylish but empty 2001 Planet remake somehow lost the thematic plot advanced prosthetics enabled the ape actors to move their mouths only to discover that they had little of substance to say. Born amid the social upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, the first cycle of five movies ( Planet, Beneath, Escape, Conquest and Battle) covered all the hot political topics of the day nuclear destruction, racism, vivisection, apartheid, slavery, warfare v diplomacy, revolution and, ultimately, reconciliation ( Battle ends with an unsteady truce and the hope of averting foretold catastrophe). F rom its origins in Pierre Boulle's Swiftian 1963 novel La Planète des singes to this state-of-the art 21st-century 3D-CG cinema outing, the darkly satirical Apes saga has proved both resilient and flexible.