The central pleasure of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ predecessor, was the undercurrent of irony coursing below its surface. It was a private gift to viewers able to recognize its humor and still embrace its drama and a welcome reprieve from those self-serious blockbusters rooted in juvenilia still occupying our theaters. The film also maniacally espoused a strong pro-ape stance, in turn suggesting a propagandistic foundational myth for the ape society predestined by the original Planet of the Apes. In Dawn, however, this element is actually over pronounced, sadly without the same subtlety of self-awareness. There is here a sharp regression to the solemnity of a Dark Knight-Skyfall mentality.
When we last saw our ape crusaders they had just stormed the San Francisco Bridge (in a sequence that should rightfully go down as the Odessa Steps of the digital era) and taken to the trees. In Dawn, the apes have established a respectable society by abiding by the moral authority of their leader, Cesar. The ape-chief is played with supreme majesty by Andy Serkis (the Lon Chaney of the digital age) but, like the rest of the ape cast, who are all acquitted by motion capture technology, is a marvel of CG artisanship the likes of which we now take for granted. Now that we have harnessed this wizardry it seems filmmakers are clamoring to breath human personality into all sorts of unhuman beings and objects. Plus, it provides actors with the opportunity to plumb aspects of their craft that get little use in most modern cinema, namely the miming skills nearly left behind in the silent era.
The Disneyfication of animals is nothing new, but in Dawn there is a tension between the anthropomorphizing impulse and that of leveraging the awe and terror audiences experience in the face of the wild, to play upon recent memories of face-ripping chimp news stories. Dawn has wit enough to push this tension to steroidal extremes: Witness the villainous bonobo Koba riding his horse through a curtain of flames, waving his AK in the air. The film doesn’t take the same care with its human cast, however, who remain resolutely human. Even a complete disregard for humans wouldn’t have been a problem (it would in fact be totally in the spirit of this nutty enterprise) if the ape society itself had been more inventively laid out. It is in this aspect of the film that director Mark Reeves’ shortfall in imagination can be seen most distinctly and it is a very unfortunate weakness for more reasons than one. The shape and accoutrements of the ape tribe are the most preposterously racist things seen in theaters in a long time. Their mores, fur-paint, and jewelry are informed by some vague pan-cultural conception of indigenous peoples. It’s apes as noble savages. Many opportunities for imaginative exploration are missed by leaving certain questions unanswered; how the customs of a feral ape society might have taken shape, for example, or, more simply, how so many and such a wide variety of apes got to the bay area in the first place. One wonders what a more thoroughgoing mind might have accomplished with the premise, a Brad Bird for example. And if it relies a little too heavily on show-stoping tableaus that could have been culled from the pages of Spectrum, Reeves’ decoupage is otherwise admirable, employing a sturdy almost classical hand. His work demonstrates an understanding of how 3D effects are best exploited (balanced compositions and a conservative approach to cinematic space being the primary principles) and there is one 360 degree pan in particular that is a delirious coup.
What Dawn ultimately gives us is a thoroughly fascistic fable that appeals to us in the way an ideological narrative of fascism might. The film equates authority with domination and culminates with a necessitation of war. If we are to take Susan Sontag at her word, much of the aesthetics of the film are likewise of a fascistic bent. The penultimate shot, to take one potent example, depicts the dominant, central figure of Cesar thronged by a mass of obedient subjects against a neoclassical backdrop. If Rise maintained overtones of popular uprisings, echoing the liberationist arc of films from the Soviet school, then Dawn is something along the lines of an ape Fall of Berlin in its corruption of the revolution (even the implications of each title’s respective predicate express this ideological contrast, “rise” denoting a rebellion against oppressors, an uprising, and “dawn” an eternal cycle, an inevitable force of nature, the sentiment so dear to fascist hearts).
The grave and significant attitude of so many blockbusters today strangely admonishes their audiences to take them seriously while underlining their inherently sophomoric nature. Certainly there is much pleasure to be had in earnestly imagining a calvary of apes or James Bond’s struggle against the defiles of age. Such gestures toward realism help to bolster the fantasy all the more and half the fun is in taking the content literally and committing to it. It is when these films begin to court allegory, when they beg our consideration as relevant to events beyond the theater, that they begin to become ponderous, even dangerous. The plot of Dawn, which is put in motion by the attempts of a few surviving humans to access an energy source within the mistrustful ape’s territory, of course resulting in tragedy, can easily (and obviously) stand in for any number of geopolitical conflicts. Taken outside the context of the previous installment (or the entire ridiculous franchise for that matter), you can read Dawn as the story of indigenous peoples encroached on by modernized culture (and case in point Richard Brody sees it as a western). In light of the recent tragedies in Palestine, however, the implications of Dawn as allegory are reductive, framing such conflicts as merely matters of age-old disputes, prejudices, xenophobia, and just plain misunderstandings. The Serious blockbuster purports to enact the moral dilemmas of our day, constructing its narratives out of real-world material, but I’m becoming increasingly suspicious that for us in the west it’s actually the other way around.
