The latest chapter in the long “Planet of the Apes” saga
takes up the action just a few years into the future promised in the ending of
the previous film, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”
Some news reports bring the situation up to
date, describing the rapid spread of the “simian virus,” actually manufactured
by government scientists to treat Alzheimer’s disease and tested on the
primates, who then ran amok through Northern California. In the new movie, a
huge ape colony — where do they all come from anyway? — dwells in its own
community in the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, under the benevolent
dictatorship of Caesar, played again by Andy Serkis.
The movie devotes a good deal of time establishing the
internal politics of the simian society, where Koba
(Toby Kebbell), maimed and mutilated by scientific
experiments, represents the chief opposition to Caesar. When a group of people
from San Francisco hoping to repair a dam and restore power to the city
intrude, the conflicting political views intensify, leading to a series of
increasingly violent confrontations with human society. Caesar attempts to maintain an attitude of
tolerance and trust in the face of some human misdeeds, but Koba
wants to wage war.
The repeated dialectic of power energizes most of the length
of a very long movie. Koba and Caesar engage in
several verbal and physical contests, eventually throwing each other all over
the forest and finally, the wrecked cityscape of San Francisco. Those many
combat sequences demonstrate the latest in cinematic acrobatics, computer
generated imaging, and motion capture, just the sort of thing many people these
days mistake for filmmaking.
The humans, who occupy less time and space in the movie than
their primate cousins, also exhibit some disagreements over their reactions to
the presence and ultimately, the threat of the animals. While some urge the use
of their considerable armory, others, led by the major human character in the
movie, Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and his girlfriend Ellie (Keri Russell)
constantly try for some form of accommodation. The key word for both Malcolm
and Caesar is trust, apparently a rare commodity in a conflict between humans
and apes.
Underneath all the spectacular action and philosophical baloney about whether the humans or the animals are the true
savages, lurks the overpowering sentimentality that conditions most movies
devoted to animals (not my favorite subject). Caesar’s mate Cornelia (Judy
Greer) gives birth to a baby, which inspires several gushy moments of parental
devotion guaranteed to either soften or sicken the hardest heart. To show that
not all humans treat apes badly, Ellie, a doctor, cures Cornelia of an illness,
thus earning Caesar’s trust in a tense situation.
The huge battle scenes, obviously intended to entertain
audiences expecting them, show thousands of apes armed with stolen weapons,
riding horses — ridiculous in itself — and overcoming the opposition of the
citizens of San Francisco. They outshoot the humans with their own weapons,
surely difficult for simian fingers to manipulate, defend themselves against
machine guns, rockets, bombs, and even a tank. “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”
leaks nonsense from every opening.
In showing the moral superiority of the apes, the movie
resembles some of the sentiments in “Instinct” of some years back, where
Anthony Hopkins played a primatologist who discovered Edenic
happiness sitting in the African grass with gorillas all day, which must
require a high threshold of boredom. The movie’s implied questioning of the
humanity of human beings certainly deserves some serious examination, but all
that dissolves in the extended battle scenes and the special effects. For all
his intelligence, Caesar neglected to study Darwin, which accounts for his
shock over the realization that apes can also mistreat other apes.
For someone who dislikes animal pictures in general, who
believes the only good dog flick is “The Wolfman,”
and who finds apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, and orangutans neither
attractive nor charming nor interesting, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” fails
miserably. The very first “Planet of the Apes” remains the best, but if you
really want to see a motion picture about humans and primates, revisit the
original “King Kong” of 1933, a terrific movie and one of my ace favorites.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2014.
