Spoilers! Also I will refer to the movie as Dawn as my fingers usually hurt after reviews and I will probably get arthritis after this.
Dawn is the sequel to Rise of the planet of the apes which is the reboot of the original, 1968 film. Many critics have compared this to Star Wars: The empire strikes back... and yeah... their pretty much right.
Dawn is a phenomenal film full of action, heart and a lot Professor X/ Magneto debates. Now go see the movie, it is awesome, go see it, don't waste any time, go see it Caesar is waiting for you!
Anyway, Dawn is one of the movies where the marketing shows you one thing but the movie is a completely different thing from what the marketing shows you. Now it's not a drive where it's almost two different genre's, so no one sue (look that up kids "Lady sue's movie Drive".) Yet in all honesty the movie we got is much better than the one we guessed we would get from the trailers. What happens in this movie is ten years after the first movie humanity has basically fallen, the disease James Franco was trying to cure got worse and turned into what the humans called "The simian disease" and long story short chaos reigned, war started and humanity has been reduced to small colonies spread out across the world. Caesar has started his own functional city of apes and even has a family. Caesar and his tribe come across a group of humans trying to power a generator they have and to not ruin the spectacular movie for anyone war ensues.
First the good which there is a lot of. Andy Serkis after this performance deserves to be recognized by the academy, he doesn't even need to win best actor I would be fine to see him just nominated. The humanity and compassion mixed with the strength and leadership he brings to the table is stunning, no one else could have done what he did in the movie, not even close to the same level of acting he did. Every time the movie focused on the apes there was just pure warmth, fellowship and just utter humanity was so captivating. And the thing is the apes talk only about 20% of the time they are on screen, 80% of it is just them signing to each and subtitles at the bottom. Yet with how the actors acted, their body language and their facial expressions conveyed things words could not have said.
The apes are all memorable, albeit at first it's very hard to tell them apart because- well apes are kind of harder to differentiate than humans but you start to be able to tell them apart from their personalities and the little things. For example Caesar's son Blue eyes has bear claws on him, Koba is very deformed, Caesar's wife Cornelia has a necklace on her head etc. All the best drama, best emotion, the best dialogue and the best scenes come from the apes because all of them are interesting characters. The best part to me in the movie was at the beginning when you see how Caesar's city comes together as a society, no words are spoken but you feel so enthralled of the going on of the apes.'
The movie is also shot very well, you get huge sweeping shots of the city and when the action kicks in the camera sits still, their is no shaky came so you see every bit of action on screen. The action in this movie is awesome- the fight choregraphy whenever the apes duke it out is awesome and by the way.... apes riding horses while wielding AK-47 and riding tanks- what more could you ask from your movie?
The main antagonist in this movie is Koba, Caesar's right hand man who was viciously experimented on by humans and even though he does some pretty damn evil stuff in this movie you still get where he is coming from and sympathize with him. This gives me hope for the Fantastic Four reboot because the guy who mo-caps Koba is playing Dr. Doom and if this performance tells me anything even if Fantastic Four turns out to be worse than the original series at least the villain will be very cool. The movie creates a very good Professor X/ Magneto relationship between Caesar and Koba and if I had to be honest it's done better here than in any of the X-men movies, even better than First Class which is my favorite X-men movie.
Also the trailers sold that the humans are the forefront and the apes are more sort of in the back in this movie. Well the Trailers are wrong because it way more 80% apes and 20 % humans which thanks god because if their is anything wrong with this movie it is that the humans in this movie are pieces of paper in this movie.
Now it's not Godzilla bad because again this is an ape-centric movie with the humans in the background. They are also better than the characters in Godzilla but that's mainly because you get them in limited doses and they don't cut attention away from the apes when they are about to do something cool. Yet they are still as bland as paper. Gary Oldman is wasted in this movie and is really the secondary villain in this movie, they try to give him a tragic backstory where he lost his family but unlike Koba where it's focused on with Gary Oldman it is only brushed by. In fact it would have been better if Gary Oldman's character was the main human character showing a man's progression from hating the thing that took away everything he loved to understanding them and learning to forgive them. Sadly are main human guy is just this middle-aged white guy who really has no personality, heck we don't even learn his name really, I only knew his name from looking it up on Wikipedia.
Plus you don't care about any of the humans in this movie. Most of the humans are either stupid, unlikeable, underdeveloped or bland. Heck during the big battle I was rooting for Koba to kill all the humans and have Caesar rule. Yet whenever an unknown ape got hurt I basically cried out and prayed to the movie gods most of the apes got out ok.
All in all I give Dawn of the planet of the apes a 9/10- It's a damn near perfect movie, just cut out the human stuff from it.
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