First point, and the essential content of a ‘review per se’:
the newest planet of the apes movie is Astonishing, a towering achievement of
technical excellence and a potent, audacious rumination on Deep Themes, all the
while standing as the most purely exhilarating summer action tentpole of the
year. See it. Then probably again; I’ve only seen it the once but I may have
another go. Conveyed? Good. Alright then.
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One often sees films about The Apocalypse, or apocalyptic
conditions, but those often end just as the grand symbol, whatever it may be,
crumbles or fails to crumble, depending on whether our heroes have succeeded or
not and the sort of film it is. And of course postapocalyptic wastelands are
innumerable through cinematic history—though recurring more frequently and with
greater unsettling familiarity and urgency of late; odd, that. But the precise
Moment when humanity claws earnestly at the dying of the light, begging and
fighting for some perceptually-promised miracle even while Knowing somewhere
deep down that the ship has sailed and sunk, the balance has shifted, and that
some metaphorical cosmic referee has just counted nine on our human experiment?
That particular instant has more or less gone woefully unrecorded. In Dawn of
the Planet of the Apes, it is played by Gary Oldman.
By sheer minutes of screen time, Gary Oldman is probably in
this movie about as much as Bryan Cranston was in the new Godzilla: about half
an hour. But where the latter was a bright spot abandoned by a broadly
nonsensical and clumsy plot, the former is essentially the representative of
all humanity and its entire civilized history. And much of that falls to Oldman
himself; his final line is the assertion that he is “saving the human race” by
blowing up a building, and where even on the page it must have read as a
pantomime lunatic’s misguided tragedy, through Oldman it reads as nothing short
of Monumental: genuine and disingenuous and certain and hopeful and desperate
and terrified all at once.
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| U WOT, APE? |
That run of adjectives aptly describes his performance as a
whole, really: The Last Ruler, a good but bereft man clawing his way back to
some modicum of humanity, suddenly beset by Madness in the form of talking, heavily-armed
apes. The fact that I have made it this far without mentioning apes is telling,
but not in the way one might fear: to pick again on the new Godzilla movie, in
that film the title creature is literally barely onscreen, and wholly
irrelevant even when he is aside from literally one triumphant moment five
minutes before the credits roll. This film is About the apes, make no mistake, but
it creates in a few painful, pointed human lines—“didn’t you used to have a
Daughter? What happened to Her?”—a very concrete world, and one in which Things
Got Bad.
At base, though, this is a tale of two civilizations: one
winking out without quite realizing it, and one triumphing without quite
wanting to. And as is only right, more time and attention and love are spent on
the winners: Caesar and his apes. Without gushing unnecessarily, this film is
the effects equivalent of its predecessors—that is to say, it is astounding. Not
for a single moment did I doubt the absolute existence and consistency of any
ape onscreen, and the principal apes are far more memorable than any human
performance in the film, bar one or two Gary Oldman moments. That
the emotional core and almost all the content of the film are purely CG apes
interacting with CG apes is made all the more remarkable by that the vast
majority of ape dialogue is conveyed via gesture and subtitle. The first half
hour or so of the movie is almost entirely without dialogue, and the confidence behind
this gesture speaks volumes; this is Caesar and Koba and Bright Eyes and
Maurice’s movie, not the humans’.
And in watching the birth of a new civilization, we the
human audience feel ourselves the alternately bemused and horrified parents,
seeing the echoes of our own collective past and those selfsame timeless
folkloric tales that must have created Us. The diplomat and the warrior, the
duty and right to rule and command, and the shadings between those concepts,
the transition from childhood to adulthood, love and honor and hope and trust
and fear and revenge: it is difficult not to feel a chill as one sees in action
the symbols and legends of an era to come. Even references to the film’s
predecessor—the symbol from the window in Caesar’s room, a clip of James Franco
on a camcorder—come off as titanic; this movie swings a broad scythe. But of
course the keenest images are the most familiar: in a fiery coup scapegoated on
a convenient enemy one cannot but see the burning Reichstag, and former test
subject Koba repeatedly slips into a ‘stupid monkey’ act so as to lull humans
into a false sense of security, and the reference to the ‘step-n-fetchit’ House
Negro archetype is inescapable.
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| HAHA YES YOU CAN TELL I AM HARMLESS BY THE WAY I AM STARING AT YOUR THROAT |
SPOILERS OR WHATEVER BUT SHUT UP IT’S MY LAST PARAGRAPH & P GENERAL ANYWAY
At base, Koba is the apes’ version of Gary Oldman: a relic
of the old world. Where Oldman is rebuilding whatever he can in honor of what
he lost, Koba would destroy all that remains just to assuage his own pain and
rage at the dead world now gone. In the end of course, everyone is right and no
one is: Oldman saved his human race time and again, only to be swept away by
the amnesia of the inescapable future; Koba destroys the last vestige of human
civilization but also the apes’ world as it had been in the process; even
Caesar ends the film as a triumphant conqueror with no homeland and only
ever-more-brutal wars his prize. Well, that and a sizable chunk of prime
downtown San Francisco real estate. Let’s just say you can count me in for Part 3:
Gentrification of the Planet of the Apes.
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