Film: Dawn of the
Planet of the Apes (2014)
Stars: Andy
Serkis, Toby Kebbell, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
Director: Matt
Reeves
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment
Ranking: 4/5 stars
I don’t always catch a film during the height of its
popularity. Whether it’s a friend
cancelling on you (totally the case here) or because I cannot afford the film
that week (the case most of the time) or simply because I didn’t have an
interest in the film initially and then was convinced to go later, I find that
there are the rare summer flicks that I head out to a few weeks after they are released. That was the case with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which
assuredly most of you have already gone to and have parceled through and formed
your opinions toward. However,
forgive me my tardiness and let me belatedly join the discussion.
(Spoilers Ahead) Three
years ago when the first film in the revival came out, I was kind of flummoxed. Why was a film this good being tagged
onto a series that included a truly awful recent revival? It was like Edward Norton’s Hulk film, except superb. The movie, with some wonderfully
inventive stop-motion effects and a powerhouse performance by Andy Serkis,
surprised audiences by being a deep, fascinating look at the hubris of man paired
with a wonderful action sequence at the tail end of the film. We pick up about a decade after those
events in Dawn, when a Simian flu has
swept the planet, killing off billions and leaving the human race in a state of
abject decay. Meanwhile, the apes
who raided San Francisco now number into the thousands and continue to advance
with both their language and cognitive skills.
The film is at its best when it is tracking the dawning of
different, difficult civilization-building happenings amongst the apes. Andy Serkis returns as Caesar, and
again gives a brilliant performance (people who think animated performance
should get their own category at the Oscars are crazy, but that doesn’t mean
that Serkis himself couldn’t get a deserved “Honorary Oscar” if the Academy is
in the mood considering his pioneering work in stop-motion over the past dozen
years). I love the way that his
character seems trapped by his advancement-how he learns the truth about others
too quickly and realizes too swiftly how conformity of opinion is impossible to
maintain, even if that opinion is “the right one.”
That’s really when the film is at its most fascinating-when
it is tackling hard issues such as betrayal and diverging thoughts on
government. The relationship
between Caesar and one of his top lieutenants (Koba) is Shakespearean in
element, and works well because both creatures are coming into their own
knowledge about the world. We see
in this film the pointlessness of war (it says something that the director
maintains a pretty solid amount of sympathy for both sides, and that we get to
see that both sides are going to war more out of fear than out of any specific
reason), and we see how something as pointless as prejudice is the catalyst of
such violence. The film is a
technical marvel, and it says something about both the effects team and the
writing/acting skills of all those involved that Koba brandishing a machine gun
doesn’t strike us as a ridiculous or comic visual, but instead a terrifying one.
My principle problem with the film remains the way that the
writers cannot seem to make the human characters interesting. This wouldn’t bother me so much, but
the human characters take up a large chunk of the film. This was the main problem with the last
film, but here we are more reliant on the human characters to carry the
story. Jason Clarke’s Malcolm is
haunted by cinematic clichés (dead wife, in love with a wounded woman, estranged
and artistic son), and isn’t given enough to do to really overcome his role as
a mirror to Caesar. He isn’t
actively bad in his part, though, as Gary Oldman unfortunately is. I don’t know if Oldman was just
confused as to whether he was a villain or not (I know I sure was), but his
character is far too underwritten and Oldman does it no favors by acting as if
he’s Commissioner Gordon in some scenes and a mad scientist on the brink of
discovering an apocalyptic drug in others. Either way this is the worst part of the film, and that’s a
rare sentence to write about such a usually brilliant performer.
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