Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Future of Cartoons

                Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, while a decent movie overall (not as good as the first one, but that’s pretty common) suffered from what looked like a lack of time put into the effects.  The script was good, highly predictable in parts – to the point where I telegraphed the final interaction between Caesar and Koba before it happened, but good nonetheless.  The acting by the humans was well done throughout.  They obviously didn’t get a whole lot of screentime in a movie devoted to our hairier ancestors, but they made the most of it.  No one will win any awards from their acting in this one, but it was full of quality performances.  The script did fail the actors a bit in that it didn’t give them a whole lot to work with.  Maybe this was intentional, but I cared more about whether any of the apes lived or died than I did the humans, and when one of the humans (I won’t give it away) sacrifices himself toward the end of the film, I didn’t really care as I was not given any reason to care.  Seriously, two minutes of this guy crying over family pictures on his ipad doesn’t get me to care as much as you would think, and therefore doesn’t give much meaning to his death.

                The apes were obviously the main focus, and Andy Serkis, who played Caesar, is a goddamned genius when it comes to motion capture.  The way that the apes move in general, Caesar specifically because he is so prevalent on the screen was incredibly convincing.  Not just the way he moves, but the way he emotes.  While I know that a lot of Caesar’s emotions came through because for the animation, Serkis did a phenomenal job laying the foundation for that. 

                The plot itself seemed pretty standard, though it was a great follow-up to the first movie, fitting right in to the end of that one and springboarding us “ten winters” into the future.  A future, mind you, that has seen San Francisco already turned back into wilderness and the apes setting up their own society in the redwood forest that they escaped to at the end of the last movie.  I do find it hard to believe that ten years of unchecked growth would make everything pretty damn unrecognizable, but I understand what the filmmakers were trying to get at.  That being said, the set-pieces were incredible.  Crafting not only the ape home, but also the city of San Francisco was a feat of magic in itself and made for a wonderful backdrop for the rest of the film.

                I had a couple issues with the movie, which was good overall, but could have been better in these respects.  The talking apes were a little off-putting.  I could deal with them speaking in single-syllabled words, “apes” “run” even “humans”, and I had no problem with Caesar talking, but when a bunch of other apes, including Caesar’s son (who oddly looks like Jared Leto) started speaking, or when Koba, the asshole ape, talks to Caesar closer to the end, it breaks from reality a little too much for me or my wife.  We would have preferred if sign language was still the main source of communication.  Maybe work up to apes fluent in English in the next movie, but this seems almost too soon for that kind of jump.  Also, I couldn’t help but feel like this was an animated film through a large portion of it.  While everything that was CGI-crafted was well done, it was not well done enough to make it totally believable.  This was no more apparent than the opening scene that showed the ape hunting party.  The apes looked okay, not totally believable but okay, but the elk and the especially the bear in the scene looked out of place.  They didn’t look like they really belonged, which was sad.  At this stage in the game, if you have the technology to make a gun-toting raccoon look believable, you should be able to craft a bear and force me to believe that it is an actual bear.  That was unfortunate as it gnawed at me for the rest of the movie and really hampered my enjoyment.  The movie felt almost like a cartoon with real actors thrown in, like Mary Poppins or Roger Rabbit which really took a lot of its credibility away.


                Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was good, but for the amount of money that it takes to go to the movies nowadays, it’s not really worth it.  I’d much rather stay home and watch it on DVD in a couple months. 

No comments:

Post a Comment