Gorilla Warfare

The appeal of the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ series was its knowing sense of humor — flipping all things human and all things ape on their heads. Darwin turned upside down.

Apes with guns. Apes on horseback. Now we’re getting somewhere. Anyone who’s a fan of the old Planet of the Apes movies has certain images cemented firmly in mind: the original 1968 film’s shocking tableau of loin-clothed humans fleeing from gorillas on horseback, as they gather up the scampering homo sapiens with nets. Those same apes wielding rifles and living in weird, Gaudí-inspired pueblo dwellings. Charlton Heston seething something about “damn dirty apes.”

Some of the touchstones from that movie are starting to fill the landscape in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the second installment in the rebooted Apes franchise (now showing in 2D, 3D and 4DX formats): Caesar, the super-evolved chimp — dosed with anti-Alzheimer’s medicine along with other lab primates by James Franco in the last movie — has led his ragtag band of escapee into Tamalpais, the misty mountains overlooking San Francisco Bay. There they live in peace and harmony away from humans, having kids and teaching them certain inalienable simian principles, such as “Ape not kill ape.” (The English instruction is a little remedial at this point.)

But alas, humans are not faring quite so well. A deadly virus — spread by a single contagious human from the lab where Caesar was experimented on — has quickly decimated 90 percent of humans worldwide. The serum that makes the apes smarter and stronger, sadly, also makes humans… dead.

This, like many bad things in the world, is James Franco’s fault.

Franco was Caesar’s guardian in the first movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but his scientific zeal led him to develop a stronger strain of the anti-Alzheimer’s drug — causing all hell to broke loose, in the form of rampaging apes taking to the streets and then the hills.

On the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge is a ragtag band of human survivors, immune to the plague, but living on diminishing supplies and — crucially — electrical power. One of their leaders is Dreyfus (Gary Oldman in blustery villain mode), who, like many human survivors, blames the apes for the whole mess. The opposite side of the coin is Malcolm (Jason Clarke from Zero Dark Thirty), who wishes to make peace with the ape tribe because… well, the humans need to get an old hydroelectric dam generator running again. So they can play their iPods and iPads again. And have a little street party.

The apes, in contrast, are not dependent on fancy power sources; they’re off the grid, living off the fat of the land. But there’s always a fly in the ointment: a bitter, scarred ape named Koba (voiced by Toby Kebbell) challenges Caesar’s authority and inflames the mutual distrust already existing between the two tribes. And before you can say “Et tu, Koba?” the gulf widens even further, leading to all-out war.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is only the second entry in the Apes reboot, and I have to say it’s growing on me. The CGI motion-capture technology used to create a world of apes (particularly Andy Serkis, reprising his role as Caesar) is more vivid than before. The apes mostly use sign language, but are starting to grasp speech (a development that shocks the humans who unexpectedly encounter their tribe in the woods). The apes’ weapons are moving from pointed sticks to AK-47s at a fairly rapid clip. (Watch Koba make a monkey out of two Rambo types at the human camp’s armory range.) The only thing we Apes fans miss, perhaps, is the groovy futuristic garb that Cornelius, Zira and Dr. Zaius sported in the original movies. But that’s sure to come later.

Indeed, the appeal of the original Apes series, based on Pierre Boulle’s novel and scripted for the screen by Rod Serling, was its knowing sense of humor, flipping all things human and all things ape on their heads. We knew it was a silly concept, but we bought into it, because it was half-clever and we liked the idea of tables turning. Darwin upside down. There were ideas afloat too, about time travel and racial division and the very human desire to bury other people’s history. (Dr. Zaius warning Charlton Heston about foraging around the Forbidden Zone: “Don’t look too deep into the past, Taylor. You might not like what you find.”)

There were also some very eloquent apes in the original movies. Not so much here, at least not yet. Not to take away from Serkis’s amazing work as Caesar, but we do hope he will eventually develop elocution enough to match the inquisitive British tones of Roddy McDowall, who played Cornelius and Caesar in the original movies.

But boy, does Serkis do a great job as Caesar here. Just as more money was spent on makeup for the “main” apes in the original Planet of the Apes, here the CGI is given special tweaking to bring to life Caesar’s every facial expression and gesture, every nostril flare, and Serkis gives his all in making the ape leader, well, almost human.

The human cast, meanwhile, dwells in the B-level zone (Keri Russell as Clarke’s love interest), which is only fitting since, other than Charlton Heston, the humans in the original movies were also pretty, er, one-dimensional.

Like the final movie in the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, this entry taps into the difficult question of “Can’t we all just get along?” While Caesar at first has high hopes of trusting the species that kept his kind locked in cages, his tolerance is severely put to the test in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

One side effect of the enhanced CGI here is, as my wife pointed out, you end up sympathizing greatly with the apes, and not so much with the humans. Complicating matters is the occasional decent behavior by Clarke, Russell and Kodi Smit-McPhee (Chloe Moretz’s young vampire acolyte in Let Me In), playing a teen who shares his comic book with an inquisitive orangutan (though God only knows what he made of Charles Burns’ weird-world graphic novel Black Hole).

And complicating matters even further is Rise director Rupert Wyatt’s statement that the Apes series will “evolve and grow in the films after this… back to the ’68 original.” In other words, this is a series of prequels. So who knows what will be salvaged, if anything, from the past five movies?

At the very least, like Joss Whedon’s Star Trek reboot, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is designed to hold the interest of non-Apes fans, while tossing a few juicy bananas to rabid fans who are keenly focused on their beloved franchise.

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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens today, from 20th Century Fox and distributed by Warner Bros. It will be shown in 2D, 3D and 4DX formats.