No monkeying around

No monkeying around

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes goes in a brave new direction

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
No monkeying around

The problem is humans. More precisely, human instinct. Even more precisely, human habit mistaken as human instinct. Evolution, either natural or genetically enhanced, comes in a messy package: as the brain develops and the mind expands, so does the inclination for savagery, and so does the capacity for violence in the struggle for survival.

Andy Serkis as Caesar in a scene from Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes.

Caesar, the ape king who rules from his primal seat above the abandoned San Francisco, is supposed to be the closest being to a human. But maybe not. Maybe the closest is Koba, the gunslinging primate on horseback who disdains Caesar’s compassion — he considers it a weakness — and favours war over co-existence. In a bold move, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes puts these two apes at the centre while the human characters — a band of survivors from the catastrophic simian flu that killed billions — lurk behind in the supporting roles. As its predecessor, the chilling Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, is a sci-fi thriller, this new film hones more towards firearm action, ape-wrestling and warzone scuffles. And yet it raises a big question: what makes an ape human, his empathy or his anger?

The story takes place 10 years after the first film, in which young Caesar becomes a super-ape who can think and speak after a laboratory experiment. At the end of that 2011 film, a terrific set piece shows an army of liberated primates storming the Golden Gate Bridge before their mass exodus into the forested mountain above San Francisco. In the new film, Caesar has grown into an imperious tribal chieftain lording over a colony of advanced apes (they build fire, some can speak and read). The film anchors its weight on him, and Andy Serkis, the actor who plays Caesar through the sophisticated performance-capture technology, gives us a soulful, complicated primate who faces the moral dilemma of a threatened sovereign. There’s even a talk of an ape — of Serkis playing an ape — being nominated for an Oscar, now that’s real evolution.

Then a group of humans, led by Malcolm and Ellie (Jason Clarke and Keri Russell), trek up the mountain to re-activate a dam that would generate electricity for the enclave of survivors down below. After the initial stage of mutual distrust, Caesar agrees to let Malcolm and his team work on the dam, and the hope of inter-species co-existence seems possible. But only for a while.

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, despite its tone of futuristic dystopia, borrows heavily from the Western genre as two “races” fight to defend their homes from the intruders. Caesar and Malcolm are the dove faction of the two species who try to push through a peace agenda; meanwhile the hawk side — the warmongering Koba on the ape side and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) from the human side — is driven by fear and paranoia as they stock up weapons and march to war.

The image of hairy apes on horseback firing off machine guns is the showpiece of Dawn. The cowboy references is obvious and the territorial disputes — as in the Wild West — are structured here as a genocidal urge for the survival of an entire species. Whereas the first film relies on creepy menace, this sequel is more expressive in the depiction of violence — animalistic and military.

When the apes, led by Koba, finally storm into the human enclave, the film shifts from a Western into a simulation of modern warfare, with young apes as foot soldiers stalking narrow corridors of abandoned buildings and dragging off their enemies — this is an image from Syria and Iraq right now or Sarajevo of the 1990s, the mad rush into the vortex by two parties driven by fear, rage and despair.

Director Matt Reeves’s earlier films include the found-footage monster flick Cloverfield and the remake of the teen vampire drama Let Me In. His strategy is to mix tension with action, and the result is a sustained verve. The risk of putting the emotional gravity of the film onto the shoulders of the apes — Caesar, Koba and the rest — is huge. After all, this is camp being taken seriously. But Reeves and Serkis work hard at it and don’t waver (or don’t question if they’re taking camp too seriously), and it pays off in accumulation as we overcome the prejudices that monkeys are clownish and silly, and buy into the dramatic possibility of their lives and struggles, which in a way are our struggles.

The film about apes is after all about humanity; James Franco supplied that in the first film, and here our hope solely rests on the anthropoid peacemaker with a heart-shaped nose. Let Caesar live.

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