Dawn Of The Planet of The Apes - The Review

In the spirit of full disclosure, I don't like movies that the story evolves around animals beating up humans. But something in the latest rendition of the Franklin J. Schaffner's classic movie, shed my age-long prejudice. 

It continues from where the last one ended. The Apes have built a home in the woods and are striving while their cousins, the Humans, are nearly decimated by a virus pandemic. A pocket of human survivors, those immune to the virus, are searching for a dam to restore power to the city of San Francisco.  The problem is that, the dam is located near the Apes home.

They first encounter the Apes at the beginning of the movie and after a skirmish with them which results in a dead ape, causes one of the Apes, Koba, wanting revenge but Caesar refuses as he does not want to be dragged into a war with the humans. This narrative is played throughout the movie until its reaches breaking point, culminating in an all-out war between the primates.

The visual effects were stunning. One can barely tell if the apes were trained monkeys or computer-generated-graphics due to the almost life-like behaviors of the apes. This is due to the impeccable work of Andy Serkis, who over the years, really helped reduce the gap between reality and computer animation. 

Gary Oldman  was severely under-used, just appearing in a few scenes.

There is no movie without its flaws. And because the movie was so good, the mistakes were few and far between and in as much as one would love to forgive them, they were so glaring that one just has to highlight them. Most conspicuously of all was, how a rag-tag army of apes with no weapons and military training could easily over-run a heavily fortified fortress. For Christ's sake, the humans even had a tank! If the 7-1 thrashing of Brazil by Germany has taught us anything, is that passion alone can only take one so far.

The scene where Koba over-comes his animal instinctive fear of  fire is thought-provoking. Although, Koba along with the rest of his chimp army overcomes it in an hate-filled, adrenaline-pumped  way. It begs a few questions. Can a genetically modified animal be more human or be a more intelligent animal? Humans with all their intelligence still have innate instincts that govern their behavior. Or is intelligence something tangible that it allows anything with enough of it to overcome its natural boundaries and fears?

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is well-crafted, intelligent and viewers will enjoy it.

Rating: 7.5/10