Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

Virtually nothing was expected of 2011's Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, so the fact it turned out to be one of the best films of the last few years was a joyous surprise both for the cinema goer and, crucially for their planned reboot of the Apes series, 20th Century Fox. Therefore, we now have the follow up film. The problem is though that expectations have been raised and new director Matt Reeves (following on from the impressive Rupert Wyatt) can't deliver a product which lives up to the previous outing. Storyline wise we're now ten years on from the previous film and, following a world wide pandemic which has annihilated the human population, we explore the interactions between a number of human survivors and the disease free apes. After a nice start showing the apes hunting some prey, the films pace slows to a crawl and never recovers. The first hour is basically spent telling the audience that apes have feelings too which, for those that know their evolution (i.e. anyone with a brain) is hardly a shocking revelation. With far too much time spent on dialogue the set pieces need to deliver and, surprisingly for Reeves who has decent form in this area, he can't produce the required goods. In fact the set pieces are a good marker to use when describing all aspects of the film: passable, but Rise did it better. For example, whereas in the last film the sight of Caesar emerging from the San Franciscan fog atop a horse was a truly breathtaking moment, the equivalent scene here of a ape charging into battle sitting on a steed whilst firing two machine guns just looks ludicrously silly. On the plus side there are a couple of scenes of impressive tension (with the now somewhat already infamous moment of a when an ape murders a couple of humans a nice draft of how to build up tension in a scene where it's already implicit what the end result is going to be), but they are few and far between. Script wise this lacks the emotional impact that the last film had between Caesar and his human "family" and there's a lack of a strong female character. Overall, when watching this it feels like there's a film in between Rise and Dawn that they just forgot to make or that we're actually just picking up the story on disc five of a ten disc DVD box set. The film ends on a mesmerising and menacing close up shot of Caesar's baby blues as he contemplates what the future holds but, as with the original franchise, it looks like this storyline has run its course already. Rating: 5/10.