Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes Review

Every so often a movie comes along that defines the cinematic landscape. In 1993, thanks to Dennis Muren and an incredible team at Industrial Light & Magic, Jurassic Park proved that Dinosaurs were able to live, breathe and eat lawyers. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is another defining moment in cinema history, again down to some amazing visual effects work, this time from Weta Digital. Visual effects are at their finest when you don’t know that they are visual effects. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the apes on display here were real.

The opening 15 or so minutes of the sequel to 2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes quickly establishes how far Caesar and his banana lovin’ buddies have come. They hunt in organised packs, viciously taking down their prey and when a gigantic grizzly decides to stick his snout in, they take care of the bear too. The apes have constructed their own, albeit primitive, society, where they all have different positions, from parents to teachers. It’s within this brutal and brilliant opener that the movie pushes the emotions of the apes ten fold onto the audience. The apes experience and present a huge manner of emotions and you’ll suddenly find yourself completely immersed into their very structured and emotional primate world.

It’s the likes of Andy Serkis (Caesar),Toby Kebbell (Koba) and other motion capture actors, alongside Weta Digital that bring the apes to life with jaw dropping realism. Again, I can’t reiterate enough how amazing the apes are. While their movements carry plenty of weight and they move with purpose and fluidity, looking like something out of a documentary, it’s their faces that surpass anything that has gone before them. Every range of emotion is on display, from fear or sadness to anger or joy, you name it, theres an ape that does it on screen.

It’s just a damn shame that there wasn’t enough attention paid to the overall script. The human cast which includes Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke and Keri Russell are incredibly under developed and none of them break a sweat in the performance stakes. Gary Oldman, an accomplished actor, tries in places to be the antagonist, but fails miserably. He is neither likeable or hateable and is barely watchable.  Jason Clarke shares quite a number of moments with the apes, especially Caesar, and while he occasionally shows some promise, his performance lacks conviction. Keep in mind that the cast were playing against the likes of Andy Serkis in a mo-cap suit and not against a ball on a stick (which, in the old days, would have helped place in the digital monkeys). There is no excuse for these performances.

On the other hand, the apes are completely over developed, and considering the movie is titled DAWN Of The Planet Of The Apes, it’s almost forgivable. But it’s not. As delightful as the apes are to watch, a bit more balance from director Matt Reeves wouldn’t have gone a stray. Arguably, you can make the point if there was more balance, you’d have alot more of the less than adequate “human” performances, so I guess we can be somewhat thankful of this imbalance.

It’s the ape performances though which highlight what an incredible art form motion capture is. Obviously Andy Serkis has been leading the way in motion capture now for quite some time and his experience shines through here and it’s very evident that he’s inspired the rest of the motion capture actors, especially Toby Kebbell. The actor who will play Doctor Doom in The Fantastic Four (released next year) seems to take great joy in delivering an absolutely psychotic performance as Koba. This is the type of monkey who would throw his own shit at you, but only after embedding a grenade in his banana fused poop.

In places, DAWN delivers time and time again. Some of the set pieces are genuinely stunning and from the opening hunt, audiences will know they are in for a treat when it comes to set pieces. Besides being entertaining and a joy to behold, some of the set pieces here are genuinely frightening. When incredibly realistic apes are rounding up humans and imprisoning them, it is provides one helluva an impact on the audience. In scenes like this, it’s almost too real, and it does a really good job at exploiting the human notion of how we view ourselves at the top of the food chain.

At times however, DAWN feels quite long and contrived and a bit slow. It’s primarily the lack lustre performances from the humans that cause such issues, where the dialogue between them seems incredibly forced and false at times, especially in the latter half of the movie.However, that really is the biggest fault one can find with DAWN. Other than that, it’s one of the better movies of a somewhat average summer block buster slate. With thrilling set pieces, history defining visual effects from Weta and apes going absolutely bananas, this is definitely worth checking out.