A couple of weeks ago, I got together with Blaine again and he showed me a couple more movies. One of them was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which we watched in a really small theater a little ways from where he lives. So here's my thoughts on the film.
Plot: Set ten years later after the events of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the virus Will Rodman worked on has caused the collapse of human civilization. Since then, Caesar has formed an ape civilization in the Muir Woods while a group of humans who have survived the collapse live in San Fransisco. One human named Malcolm convinces Caesar to allow him and some other human to work on a dam in the woods so that they can have electricity in the city, and they begin to form a friendship. But things start to go uneasy between them as both humans and apes create a conflict, and Malcolm and Caesar have to find a way to prevent war between their races.
When talking about my thought about watching this movie, it's important to know that I would by little to no means consider myself a fan of this particular franchise. The first movie mainly just showed me what I already knew about the franchise just based on what I heard with things like a few moments from The Simpsons that have done parodies about it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was not much of an improvement as it was better, but still had a predictable all around story. So it's saying quite a bit when I say that I found myself enjoying this movie to the point that I want to know what they're going to do in the next movie. Whereas the other two movies where really a means to just know what happened and I wouldn't really care, this one kept be interested almost from beginning to end. The apes themselves were interesting with how they have formed as a sentient civilization with Caesar as the wise and highly respected leader that you do not want to mess with. The human characters where likable too. Granted, most of them where characters that you have seen before, but at the same time, similar to the human characters in Rise of Planet of the Apes, the film does a good enough job in developing them to the point that you do root for them. The GCI is also much better. Some shots did come out as obviously fake to me, but even then, it was a nice improvement from the last film, particularly with making it visually helping us tell the ape characters apart. But the real heart of the movie is the conflict. Despite how much I expected it to, the story wasn't as predictable as I thought it would be. And a lot of that comes from how the whole situation isn't very black and white. Even with the antagonists in this movie, you can see their points of view and why they were so driven about what they were doing. The action was also pretty entertaining, which is great because since all I really remembered about the action in the last film was apes jumping off of buildings a few stories high and land on the ground fine. But here, it's bigger, darker, and much, much more entertaining. The only problems I have with this movie was that we didn't get as much time with Gary Oldman, and the first half hour of the movie did feel a little long for me personally.
And that's my review for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It was compelling, it's well acted, it has really good CGI, it had likable characters, and it all around succeeded where Planet of the Apes and Rise of the Planet of the Apes genuinely failed in terms of really entertaining me. Did it make me want to see more of the franchise? No. But it got me interested for what they'll do for the next movie, and that's still quite a win for the movie on my account.
Rating: 90%
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