Movie review: Rise+Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Hello!

I remember watching Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes as a child and not sleeping for a few days afterwards. With these bad memories from childhood I decide to challenge myself and try the newest Apes’ edition. I hope you enjoy my reviews!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011).

From quite inexperienced director Rupert Wyatt comes this science-fiction reboot of the beloved franchise. I have seen Tim Burton try to do justice to this series but unfortunately I haven’t seen the original one. I probably should watch it.

Speaking about Rise I really liked this movie. 

James Franco, in my opinion, is one of the greatest actors nowadays and I always enjoy his performance. He fits perfectly in this role as a scientist and a loving son. I felt an emotional connection with Caesar through him.

The film has an amazing premise and it also shows that humans and apes are not as different as we might think.

Human kind is always using animals to try out medicine, makeup and all kinds of stuff and it is no surprise that apes are not happy about it. The movie shows that everything that happens is people’s fault and that they are to blame for all that madness. Apes are just avenging their own kind. And you cannot argue that revenge is not a human emotion, so as a result, you can’t see apes as villains. In this case, they are more like victims, even thought, they are killing humans.

From production point: monkeys jumping though windows looked super cool. Caesar speaking for the first time was such a powerful scene. Action was also great – not too overboard, stayed quite realistic.

Other notes: Young Caesar was such a cute monkey. What is more, I do not know who I hated more Draco Malfoy in HP or Dodge Landon in this movie (both played by Tom Felton). I guess props go to the actor behind these characters – he knows how to provoke strong feelings, particularly hatred.

The first half hour of the movie was super positive and then everything went sour. The first hour and the second half hour are completely different parts of the movie – everything just changes so quickly.

One last thing: Monkeys’ voices are super intimidating and annoying, though, I have a huge interest in them as animals or perhaps I should say as creatures almost equal to human race but exciting and unique in their own way.  

When I had finished the movie I realized that I have seen it before, probably in the movie theater when it came out. However, I enjoyed it as much as the first time around. Rate 4.5/5

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

I have finally found the time to see this movie.  I really enjoyed it but I also have some criticism.

Short summary: The movie picks up 10 years after the events of the first film. Apes are living peaceful life in the forest while humans are destroying themselves with the virus that made apes smarter and also there is a general chaos in the whole wide world. The events of this movie start with a group of people that try to find a dam to produce electricity in the apes’ forest. By accident one of the apes is killed and the Dawn stars.

Let’s start with negative stuff. To my mind, the beginning of the film was too slow and overall the first hour was kinda boring to me. It was interesting to see the culture of apes but the human problems with electricity was the weak spot. And all the human characters were overpowered by apes. Mainly by Caeser and Koba.

Andy Serkis is a genius at playing motion capture characters. He gains a lot of money for his work but he definitely deserves every penny he gets. And he also deserves at least an Oscar nomination if not the win. I wish the Academy would recognize motion capture actors as other ‘real ‘ones.  Of course, we also need to talk about Koba played by Toby Kebell. He was the scene stealer of the century. The plot was pretty slow at first but in the end the movie surprised me in the good way. All the CGI effects and motion capture were amazing as I have previously mentioned.

I loved that the movie got deeper into the theme that humans and apes are alike: they have the same father-son problems, fights growing up; they care about their family and home. My favorite scenes in the movie were, of course, the ending shot of Caesar’s eyes (I also loved the fact that all the apes had human like eyes) and the full circle shot with Koba on a tank. That was really well done.

In comparison with the first film, I think that it was stronger than this one. So Dawn is 4/5 while Rise is 4.5/5. 

Trailer: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes trailer Rate 4/5