Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is the second installment in Matt Reeves trilogy which served as a reboot. The series starts with the story of these apes gaining sentience whereas the tv series and 20th Century Fox movies before it started long afterwards. The trilogy is also notable for telling its story with apes being the protagonists instead of humans.

The first movie in the trilogy, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is worth watching but is not necessary viewing before the strongest second entry which fills in the backstory of the first in a subtle and effective way. Prior to this trilogy Reeves’ directed the mysterious J.J. Abrams-produced giant monster movie Cloverfield, and the America-British adaptation of horror movie Let the Right One In, called Let Me In.

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Caesar is the leader of the apes who live peacefully in the Muir Woods with the assumption that humanity is extinct until a group of humans including Malcolm (Jason Clarke), his wife Ellie (Kerri Russell), their son Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Carver (Kirk Acevedo), and Foster (Jon Eyez) stumble across their path.

War and Sci-Fi movies both require a lot of context. Dawn avoids the pratfall of information dumps delivered by a scientist character. It does this with an intro that describes the destruction of most of mankind from a Simian Flu pandemic. Many movies have an intro like this but Dawn’s version manages to be entertaining in the way it incorporated overlays of many sources over a map that illustrated the pandemic’s spread.

The movie was released in 2014 and is set in 2021, so of course the pandemic exposition has a much different weight now. The movie manages to build out the context of this world’s past with the attention to detail put in the set production. There are many worn-down waypoints with signage to warn that one needs a test to pass and that people may be shot at if deemed a contagious threat. The past is also made personal in the moments of mourning for the human characters in this film.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is different from most war movies in that it is completely fictional. The best war movies are empathetic to both sides of battle or at least give a good glimpse into the motivations and desires of them. Dawn is free from years of historical context and gives a very balanced look at the stakes and dreams of the apes and humans alike. They have both lost loved ones, the apes have lost some of their kind at the hands of humans and the humans have lost family from the Simian Flu. Malcolm lost his first wife to the pandemic, while Ellie lost her daughter.

In one scene, Ellie has a disagreement with the trigger happy Carver about who is to blame for the virus. She claims that the virus was created by “scientists in a lab” and that apes are not to blame. Carver does not agree; he says that apes are the cause since it is called the Simian Flu. Unfortunately, this kind of bigotry that involves unfairly pinning the destruction of a virus unto a group of beings feels different in 2021.

Dawn manages to have more developed characters and more empathy for its apes then most war movies do for their human characters. As the apes are only beginning to gain the ability to speak English, the movie owes a lot to the motion capture acting and a whole non-verbal way of communication. For instance, there is a very particular way that Koba’s outstretched hand conveys a desire for public forgiveness or acceptance. Matt Reeves’ world-building and great performances from Andy Serkis (Gollum from the Lord of the Rings franchise) as the protagonist Caesar, Toby Kebbal (Dr. Doom from 2015’s Fantastic Four) as the Judas-like villain Koba, and Karin Konoval as Maurice the orangutan make this shrewdness of apes a believable community.

Koba is the villain of this movie. He finds a way to use the hostility between the apes and humans to his advantage to start a battle. In a quiet and memorable scene, Caesar is making a case for letting humans do work nearby and Koba repeats the lines “human work” as he fingers the scars and deformities that humans inflicted on him. Kebbal’s performance as Koba is menacing and his motivations are effectively communicated so we understand why he does what he does.

The pacing of the battle sequences make for thrilling action entertainment. The film opens with an amazing display of the apes’ abilities as their hunt for stags is interrupted by a bear. The real filmed environments are rich and beautiful and really make these scenes work better than a cgi forest. The large action set piece at the climax of the movie ends with a rotating long take from the perspective of a tank that Koba takes over in a battle against the humans. The visually stunning action is so enthralling though because of the way Dawn of the Planet of the Apes effectively makes the audience care for its human and nonhuman characters and because of the care that was put into creating their world.

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