Like that rather glum, under-budgeted affair, Dawn takes place many years after the event which caused the balance of power to shift away from a human-dominated Earth: the release of a lab-created biological agent called "simian flu" in the media, the exact beat upon which Rise ended, and upon which Dawn begins, with one of the very best "montage of news reports" exposition bursts that I have seen in many days, as fragments of talking head segments appear beneath a map of the earth showing the vectors by which the flu spread and also depicting the fading out of lights representing human civilisation, so that at end, when we arrive back where we started on the West Coast of the United States, it's all dark and empty and cold, as Michael Giacchino's score mournful taps out a few dying notes. You can't ask for a more atmospheric opening than that, nor one which more efficiently tells us everything we need to know (not least of the reasons that Dawn is such a terrific sequel is that it's so good at standing on its own two feet as a completely self-contained narrative).
And so we arrive, ten years after Rise, to find that the super-intelligent chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans created in that movie have built a primitive but very stable and literate society in the depths of Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Led by the first mutant ape, Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a performance that re-writes the rulebook on what you can achieve with motion capture), the apes have no desire to become the dominant species of anything, but simply to live in quiet contentment in their small corner of the world; this becomes untenable when a group of humans - thought extinct for two years now - stumble upon the ape village while in the woods on entirely unrelated business. One of them, Carver (Kirk Acevedo), panics and shoots the juvenile ape Ash (Doc Shaw), and from there on out, everything snowballs: Caesar and the leader of the human expedition, Malcolm (Jason Clarke) are able to put off immediate conflict between the two populations, and even strike a deal for the humans to continue their exploration to find and repair a hydroelectric dam in the woods, the last hope for keeping electricity flowing to San Francisco, which has already devolved into a dead, weed-choked collection of buildings with all the humans clustered into one unfinished skyscraper. But Caesar's apparent second-in-command Koba (Toby Kebbell) refuses to forgive or trust the humans, remembering their horrible treatment of him when he was still a lab animal, and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), the leader of the human colony, responds to the discovery that the apes have formed a nascent human-like society by breaking out the stockpiled weapons to make sure they still work, and as is the case, when a population begins to ready for war, it has a tendency to make sure that war will break out.
Mordant stuff, but even at their very worst, the Planet of the Apes films have been more concerned with how to use a population of intelligent simians as a metaphor for how we humans structure our own societies, with all their warts and jerry-rigged alliances (though its vocabulary suggests otherwise, it's always seemed clear that the series is aware that humans are, after all, apes ourselves). And even with its rather bleak outlook on the hopes of peace between distrustful neighbors, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is about as rousing and involving as any summer movie ought to be, not because is packed full of heightened action, but because it makes its action count so much, by basing it so firmly in character rather than raw spectacle.
The film triumphs in making a rich, complex web of characters we admire and characters we despise, but who in both cases always seem to be acting out of an honest internal place rather than because the script needs "heroes", "villains", and "conflict", and this is even more impressive given that the best of them are CGI apes who communicate either with subtitled sign language or grunting, grammatically half-baked English. It is astonishingly nuanced for a big honking summertime movie, with Serkis and Kebbell in particular (along with the small army of technicians turning their performances into CGI characters with amazingly flexible facial expressions) creating such conflicted, ambivalent figures that even as the plot structure insists that Koba must be the Bad Guy and Caesar the Hero, there are shadings within those binaries that go far beyond that. Caesar is not a pacifist, but a realist; Koba is not a slavering maniac, but a deeply wounded, resentful figure. Both have many wonderful moments, a scene in which Koba distracts some gun-toting humans by acting like a daffy circus chimp is a beautifully sad and creepy moment, pure popcorn movie magic.
And having done such a good job of building its characters (the non-human ones; though it's so clearly the "point" that the humans feel kind of undernourished and one-note that I tend to see it as a strength, not a flaw), the film then proceeds on to the business of setpieces and a generally grim and overly-sober worldview, but it feels earned here in a way that it hasn't since The Dark Knight, where the whole "summer movies have to be harsh and not fun" shtick first set up shot. There are sublime moments: the sight of a gas station in the woods coming to life and promising hope and a future; a shot from atop a tank gun turret spinning listlessly and bringing the camera with it, the kind of thing that might sound generically cool for most tentpoles, but is given great depth and drama thanks to the hard, colorless lighting and the moaning score (seriously, Giacchino is up to some great things with the music: looking back to the groundbreaking original, collating modern blockbuster music tropes, tugging at our heart in a most shameless way. I think he might be the single most important person in making the film what it is). Director Matt Reeves finds the exact right mixture here between grandiosity and visual storytelling here in a way that makes for fine, compelling epic filmmaking, and while this is one of the film's best single gestures, it is not the only place where the emotional needs of the moment and the desire to make broad, crowd-pleasing spectacle are satisfied simultaneously. It's a perfectly balanced film, one that escalates things steadily but not with a predictable rhythm, and one that has invested so much in the character drama that even though the climax is a simple one-on-one fight, it feels more visceral and important than all the exploding cities that recent years have thrown at us.
It is, basically a rich film; one of the richest that has come along on a giant studio budget into a prominent summer slot in a long time. I don't suppose that it's necessarily trying to break any new ground; it's more that it's doing extremely well things that are typically only done satisfactorily. But I had an easier time investing emotionally in the film's story, its characters, and its setting (designed, fucking brilliantly, by James Chinlund, and handsomely shot by Michael Seresin) than I've had with a movie of similar market position and aims in a very long time, and for a movie about that time that mutant apes took over the planet, that's an outstanding achievement.
I was flipping back and forth for three days before I wrote the review, it only seems right to keep on doing it now that it's published. It's the old conundrum: not as good as the 9/10 Edge of Tomorrow, better than the 8/10 Days of Future Past, and I hate decimal points.
Heartily agree. Great review, Tim.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I'm glad you liked the film and I've read nothing but raves from the critics I respect, but I'm a little baffled by everyone's excessive enthusiasm as I found this was only good enough to make me wish it was much better.
ReplyDeleteAll the work with the Apes was sublime and nuanced (and we need to reward Andy Serkis with a bunch of real awards already), but the conventional, often nonsensical plot kept getting in the way for me.
Too many of the human characters felt stock (like Acevedo's readily hateable plot device of a character, the ruiner of things) or superfluous (like Jason Clarke's son who made sense thematically but is given nothing to do of any consequence). And then there were all these constant little things I couldn't buy that kept taking me out of it, like the fact that the apes seemed to have an endless supply of machine gun ammo that they never had to reload or that all these redwoods seemed to have sprouted all around that abandoned gas station in only 10 years (though it was a lovely image) or how it only took 5 people to get a hydroelectric plant working that had been shut down for many years.
And I admit this is personal, but as a resident of the Bay Area, the wonky geography was driving me nuts (and no San Franciscan would ever call BART the subway as Clarke does).
Perhaps these are all nitpicks that shouldn't bother me too much but they did serve to keep me at a distance and I found the emotional connection this time around to be lacking.
Still, I did quite enjoy the film overall, and I am not blind to its excellent qualities. I loved the sound design in particular. It's a great summer film (though Edge of Tomorrow leads the pack for me), so I can't hate on it too much.
I just want to know one thing: did Gary Oldman lead his troops to war in a yellow school bus a la BFTPOA?
ReplyDeleteSeeing it tomorrow (release day in the UK), and everything I've heard has been encouraging. The prequel surprised me as being a legitimately fantastic character drama that really only briefly sojourns into action-blockbuster territory. If this one actually surpasses "Rise" in the morally-complex, character-driven stakes, then "The Winter Soldier" could actually have competition as my favourite blockbuster of the year, a title I thought was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
ReplyDeleteWe really need to bring back some kind of Special Achievement Oscar for the work he's been doing in these films. And Kobbell as well. My favorite scene in the whole thing is a quiet conversation early on, before the humans even come. Caesar and Maurice look at what used to be San Francisco and talk about “them” and if they’re really gone. In the spaces between their thoughts is the heaviness of what they’re discussing: the potential extinction of the planet’s dominant species in favor of their own.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I definitely have to agree with Woodside with this. I did appreciate that the film kept it's exposition paired down as much as possible and enjoyed the gestures that were made towards possible, more interesting, characterisations (Oldman breaking down over his photograph being a favourite,if pretty corny, moment), which is all very admirable, but mostly made me me wish I was watching a film that dedicated much more of it's 2 hour 10 minute runtime to fleshing out those flashes of colour.
ReplyDeleteThere were also some incredibly surreal moments, which really threw me out of the film. One that especially stands out is the scene in which Jason Clarke's son shows the orangutan, Maurice, his comic (Charles Burns' "Black Hole"). This is really for its unintentional comedy - the idea that anyone, no matter how naive or dewy eyed, or how many unicorns they draw in their notepad, would hand over a book in which the main narrative involves the manifestation of the sexual anxieties of a group of adolescents as a sexually transmitted disease that causes horrific mutations (vagina mouths, skin shedding, weeping pustules galore), all illustrated in graphic detail, as a kind of optimistic gesture of solidarity and companionship made me laugh pretty hard.
Also, I definitely found the tank turret shot you mention incredibly alienating rather than sublime, although I'd probably concede that the dissonance was kind of the point.
Really enjoyed the review though. As always you write well enough to make me want to go re-watch the film immediately, even if it's just to figure out precisely what it is I disliked about it so much.
I think this movie was to a certain extent a victim of its own (CGI) success. That is, I totally accepted that the apes were people, and as such I expected that they would have a bit more character depth. To me, the ape characters were different from other stock Hollywood characters mainly by virtue of being apes. And the human characters were simply stock characters. I can't help but think that I've seen this movie before, many times, in virtually the same form.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for movies that address racism, but I was hoping that Dawn would tackle the subtle, insidious racism that occurs *after* two cultures have coexisted for a while. Maybe that will be the next film.