SAVVY APES
A chilling parable about our fragile place in the world
The best scene in the movie is brief, violent and disturbing, yet strangely funny. A virally mutated chimpanzee does a little monkey dance for two macho men with machine guns to appear simple, unthreatening and un-evolved.
The men mock the chimp with smug self-satisfaction as they clutch their barrels. But the chimp is no ordinary ape and soon has both of their firearms, wreaking vengeance on the species that put him in a cage, cut his body open and performed experiments on him.
That’s right, humanity: We are the Nazis in Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
We are the ones responsible for the outbreak of a lab-created virus that killed the majority of the human population. We are the ones who caged animals, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. We are the ones who kill and maim and judge others in a self-righteous and altogether narcissistic mission called progress.
We think we are strong, but as that one perfect scene illustrates, our arrogance proves our undoing in this elegantly executed parable about our place in the universe and the overall meaning of life.
Pulling us into the apocalyptic world of the future in the opening credits, director Reeves (Cloverfield) shows us satellite images of the world’s largest cities going dark as infrastructure starts failing, the grid collapses and civilization reverts to the Dark Ages.
The new reality belongs to the apes. They do not need light or power to survive. Thanks to their genetically altered brains, made possible by James Franco’s fiddling in the previous film, their intelligence rivals humans.
They have made cities of their own, and standing in the middle of this new ape metropolis fashioned from fallen logs and moose skulls is Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who learned sign language and had a meaningful, loving relationship with the human world.
Caesar is the alpha of the clan, but like all alphas, he’s constantly being tested by the bitter beta, typically the angry one with a childhood axe to grind and a very bad facial scar.
In this case the beta is Koba (Toby Kebbell), the lab chimp with all the scars and a hatred for humanity’s vivisection-friendly take on the natural world. Koba wants to kill all the surviving humans, but Caesar seeks a peaceful coexistence.
The humans, meanwhile, think they have every right to take tanks and rocket launchers to ape city because they believe they are the master race, with natural title to the Earth’s resources.
So many pieces of the moral landscape look and feel familiar, but once you start assembling the jigsaw puzzle, the expected landmarks disappear in a blurry bid for survival.
The team of screenwriters essentially distils the dilemma down to a faceoff between Darwinian theory and the redeeming, spiritual presence of love and its propensity toward altruistic acts.
This is the reactive core of the whole Planet of the Apes franchise, first powered in Pierre Boulle’s novel and adapted to the big screen in the 1968 Charlton Heston classic: We get to look back at the evolutionary road and see where we may have taken a wrong turn.
Reeves clearly understands the heart of his movie is emotional and spiritual, so he wisely spends the most screen time building character, solid emotional arcs and dynamic bonds between the humans (played here by Keri Russell, Gary Oldman and Jason Clarke) and the apes.