Apes rule in all their humanity

Film
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (M)
4.5 stars
Jason Clark, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman
DIRECTOR MATT REEVES

REVIEW MARK NAGLAZAS

Humanity may have gone backwards since the last Planet of the Apes movie but the filmmaking technology that brings its simian stars to life has evolved in leaps and bounds.

Long gone are the moth-eaten monkey suits that would barely pass muster at a Halloween party to be replaced by creatures rendered so realistically, imbued with so much humanity (if that is the right word) it's easy to suspend disbelief at a band of uppity apes climbing the evolutionary ladder after the decline of civilisation.

But it is not just the startling visuals that makes this the top banana of all CGI-driven fantasy franchises; incoming director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) has fashioned an epic inspired by Shakespeare and The Godfather that marries a moving family saga, sobering apocalyptic fable and thrilling political drama.

Indeed, Caesar (Andy Serkis), the most evolved of the apes who was being used for laboratory experiments in the last movie, and his tribe are brought to such vivid life by Reeves and his expert F/X team the human stars are somewhat forgettable (and, compared with the great Serkis, probably getting paid peanuts).

But the lack of impact of the human strand of the movie doesn't fatally undermine Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel that both extends the themes introduced in the groundbreaking 2011 series reboot and sets up a franchise to anticipate for years to come.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is set a decade after the previous movie, with much of humanity wiped out by a virus that was unleashed by the San Francisco company that was using Caesar's mother and other apes in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

Caesar and the renegade apes have found sanctuary in the forests north of the Golden Gate Bridge, establishing a sustainable civilisation while the remaining humans in the ruined San Francisco are struggling to survive.

When a group of humans led by Australian actor Jason Clarke (of Zero Dark Thirty fame) enter the apes' territory seeking to restart a hydro-electric dam, Caesar puts up a barrier, fearful that even a minor encroachment is a threat to their world.

However, Caesar, who was raised by humans after the death of his mother, has empathy for the plight of the embattled survivors and allows Clarke's Malcolm and his team to work on the dam, a decision that raises the ire of the hot-headed human-hating, power-hungry Koba (Toby Kebbell), whose name has been carefully chosen to evoke Joseph Stalin.

A series of missteps and misunderstandings leads to conflicts within both camps and ultimately between humans and apes, with Caesar, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, struggling to keep together his own tribe at the same time as preventing all-out war.

The Planet of the Apes franchise has always been politically charged, with the original 1968 movie reverberating with the shocks of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

The new movie's concerns are not that specific, apart from the general theme of the hubris of man and the ecological disaster and nods to the gun-control debate. Instead, it is a more classical political drama, with Caesar, who is almost a tragic figure, pulled between his feelings for his human past and the demands of protecting his family and his fellow apes.

The gravity of the new movie deprives Dawn of the Planet of the Apes of much of the wit and cheekiness that made Rise of the Planet of the Apes so much fun. It is essentially a war movie, whose most indelible image is Koba on horseback riding out of the flames towards the quavering humans.

However, there is a wonderfully funny, viciously satirical moment in which Koba pretends to be a dumb animal to disarm the fears of a couple of gun-toting, ape-hating humans, rather like a slave dancing for their white masters in 12 Years A Slave. The laugher subsides when Koba gets his hands on a gun.

As mentioned, the humans are a rather pallid, undeveloped group, so much so that the plot developments in the latest stages of the movie, in which mention is made of other survivors and air strikes to counter the ape invasion, are confusing. It's because we have so little idea of what is going on in the human world.

However, that weakness is more than compensated for by the film's immersion in the simian world, which is so deep and respectful you almost expect David Attenborough to wander in with a microphone and ask Caesar about his mating habits. "Well, David, I usually start with Barry Manilow on the turntable . . ."