Dawn of the Plan­et of the Apes

It was with some trep­i­da­tion that mon­key lovers faced the last Plan­et of the Apes reboot — 2011’s Rise of the Plan­et of the Apes. Their hairy lit­tle hands had been burned by Tim Burton’s star-stud­ded stum­bler, and the idea of more hunched actor­ing, por­ten­tous ​“rel­e­vance” and chat show-stalk­ing thes­pi­ans talk­ing about how long they spent in make-up was dis­tinct­ly unappealing.

In fact, Rise turned out to be pret­ty good, part­ly due to the pres­ence of James ​“James Fran­co” Fran­co, but most­ly because it owed much to both the 1972 mini-bud­get Con­quest of the Plan­et of the Apes and James Marsh’s mon­key anthro­po­mor­phism doc, Project Nim. It was a film that worked as a tear-jerk­er rela­tion­ship dra­ma, eco-fable, thriller and prison movie at once. A major char­ac­ter, Cae­sar, also just hap­pened to be a super-smart chimp.

That’s not an easy trick to pull off twice, and Dawn, alas, doesn’t come close. The film is set after a plague of ​‘simi­an flu’ has wiped out most humans, leav­ing Cae­sar and his band of fast-evolv­ing mon­key pio­neers to build a new world. As with any grow­ing empire (sure­ly the tit­u­lar pre­fix of the next Apes out­ing?), fac­tion­al­ism and rumour beset the leader, again played by Andy Serkis, this time with regal anguish in the face of Shake­spear­i­an plot­ting and philo­soph­i­cal awak­en­ing. When a band of human sur­vivors wan­der into his king­dom, the stage is set for a noble savage/​settler face-off that tries, and most­ly fails, to make mud­dy points about the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of friend­ship and the unstop­pable force of vio­lence once unleashed.

To be fair, Dawn has picked a los­ing game, but it’s one that most Plan­et of the Apes movies have in com­mon with post-apoc­a­lypse films: how to recre­ate the ini­tial thrill that comes from jux­ta­pos­ing the famil­iar with the wild­ly improb­a­ble. The apoc­a­lypse fan­ta­sist is addict­ed to a drug with hor­ri­bly dimin­ish­ing returns. Plan­et of the Apes itself hit the spot sev­er­al times, from goril­las on horse­back to the famous final shot reveal, but even that film had nowhere to go in its sequels.

There was a nuclear bomb, a school bus, a chimp in a space­suit — all attempts to clash the mun­dane with the out­landish, but nev­er achiev­ing the impact of that bril­liant first time. Dawn sim­i­lar­ly works best in the moments that jar — Cae­sar on horse­back rides past a petrol sta­tion in a for­est glade, an ape perch­es over the Stars and Stripes as humans are cor­ralled at gun­point. But these instances are few.

The momen­tary thrill of see­ing our own civil­i­sa­tion reduced to rust and dust is leav­ened by anony­mous direc­tion and a plot that, aside from the because-we-can CGI set-pieces, recalls the long (and prob­a­bly best) for­got­ten TV spin-off of the orig­i­nal film series. As the human lead, Jason Clarke has nei­ther the dra­mat­ic chops nor the lines to stand up to all the mon­key­ing around, and his rela­tion­ships with his bland para­mour and for­get­tably sen­si­tive son are left — maybe thank­ful­ly — unexplored.

His absence makes for a curi­ous­ly lop­sided cre­ation in which Serkis’ Cae­sar is the beast­ly, charis­mat­ic side of a cross-species dou­ble act where the oth­er guy fails to show up. With such a sin­gle over­pow­er­ing char­ac­ter, the nar­ra­tive is rail­road­ed into just the kind of finale you’d expect from what inevitably becomes a just anoth­er super­hero movie: a big, long fight on a con­struc­tion site. Only this time, with monkeys.

Dawn of the Plan­et of the Apes isn’t a bad film, but it is dis­ap­point­ing and dispir­it­ing. It’s a long, down­ward spi­ral from a peak of mild diver­sion to the entrop­ic cli­max: a mish­mash of spec­tac­u­lar unsur­prise, Epic 101 tick-box­es and all water­marked ​‘Fran­chise’. Let’s hope the inevitable third part doesn’t turn out to be such a plan­et-sized banana skin.