The style and vigor of Matt Reeves’s CGI spectacular is demonstrated at approximately the 60-minute mark when an Uzi-carrying ape, his face contorted in a battle cry recalling Braveheart-era Mel Gibson, gallops through a wall of fire on the back of a black stallion. The scene might herald the kind of early-2000s action movie that gave Vin Diesel top billing without any semblance of embarrassment. It’s the “cool guys don’t look back at explosions” joke all over again, except instead of a muscly ex-cop or stunt driver, our wicked warrior is a hairy, teeth-baring ape.
The apes-are-just-like-us conceit has its 46th birthday with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the latest entry in a franchise that spans eight movies, two television series, and an array of books and video games. The original 1968 film played out our similarities to our simian cousins in a deadpan critique of human superiority and creationism—the sort of pessimistic, dialogue-heavy parable its original writer, Rod Serling, made his career out of. While the ensuing four films became increasingly esoteric and campy, 2011’s surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes emulated its ancestor’s statement-heavy style in a Frankenstein-esque man-creates-monster origin story. The newest film takes a step away from that lineage, favoring the explosive fun of a summer blockbuster over cultural exposé.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes begins with a highlight reel of the decade or so that passed since the previous installment. Excerpts from panicked news reports about CDC quarantines inform us that 99% of the world has been killed by a virus accidentally created in an experimental Alzheimer’s drug trial in the previous film. The drug’s simian test subjects, however, developed extraordinary intelligence. While the death toll caused civilization to crumble into small colonies of people who were immune to the virus, the able-minded apes took to the woods to live free from human contact.
Caesar (Andy Serkis) is the bold, benevolent leader of a clan of apes who communicate in a blend of sign language and broken English. A few miles away in the ruins of San Francisco, a group of surviving humans, led by a former police chief (an uninvested Gary Oldman), are attempting to live without electricity. Leading the mission to restore power is Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and his wife, Ellie (Keri Russell), an architect-doctor power couple dressed in head-to-toe Patagonia who discover the ape community after a chance encounter on a dam scouting expedition. As fate would have it, said dam is on ape turf, and though Caesar doesn’t initially trust humans, he and his most devoted followers are willing to cooperate in an attempt to avoid violence. However, his plans are foiled by one of his most trusted comrades, a heavily scarred ape named Koba, who thinks eradicating man is the only way to survive.
Thus begins a two-hour struggle of trust and power between the humans and the apes, the latter of whom begin to break ranks over differing opinions of their new neighbors. But the most memorable moments in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes have little to do with the path of its narrative. Embracing 3-D for the first time in the series, the movie looks stunning—from the CGI apes, each individualized with specific micro-facial expressions and scars, to the richly gloomy atmosphere (the overcast skies virtually a calling card now for director Matt Reeves). Every drop of rain and luxuriant display of post-apocalyptic decay oozes a sort of tragic elegance that’s a stark contrast to the well-lit labs of the previous film. The effort put into these aesthetic improvements, however, doesn’t happen without some degradation elsewhere. Or, to quote the two middle-aged fans in matching POTA shirts sitting next to me in the theater: “Something’s just missing.”
While the movie ticks off every mark on the summer blockbuster checklist, the human characters are noticeably shallow and consistently overshadowed by their CGI counterparts. Little mention is made of the horrible trauma they’ve endured, and with the exception of a scene in which power is momentarily restored and the group hears music for the first time in years, it’s easy to forget that they once lived normal lives. Reeves, who works off a screenplay by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Mark Bomback, also seems unsure about his stance on the relationship between the humans and the apes. Throughout the film, the characters repeatedly claim that man’s demise was self-inflicted, a disaster born from the cruelty and selfishness that is intrinsic to human nature. But among the survivors, we see nothing but kindness and dedication to the community.
The original film found its punch line in the way the audience hates the simian villains and yet recognizes their own reflections in their actions. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, aligns us with Caesar and the other human-friendly, communicative apes who support peace with mankind. The San Francisco survivors are depicted as such one-dimensional heroes that it’s almost a surprise when Caesar declares, after a piece of treachery by Koba, that “ape is just like man.” But reading into that inconsistency might be like wondering about the mechanics of the cars in The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. If no longer achieving the same quality of double-edged cultural critique of its predecessors, the new film fits snugly within the multiplex—a gun-toting, horseback-riding monkey riding through $170,000,000 flames.