Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2014
	Director: Matt Reeves (Cloverfield)
	Actors: Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight trilogy), Jason Clarke (The Big Gatsby, Terminator Genisys), Keri Russell, Andy Serkis (King Kong), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, SF, Drama
	Conditions of visioning: 15.06.2015, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: Ten years after a virus has decimated most of the human population and given birth to clever Apes, both populations have evolved in isolation, until a group of men needs something in the territory of the Apes.
Review:  In 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (strangely not yet reviewed on this blog, but would probably rate 8/10) initiated a new series of films that reboots the one that started in 1968 with the classic Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, and continued with several movies and a TV-series. A first attempt of reboot was made in 2001 by Tim Burton but didn't meet success, a justified fate in my opinion. The screenplay writers that made the success of the first movie are back: the relatively new Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (also on Jurassic World and Avatar 2&3), this time accompanied by the more experienced but not necessarily more talented Mark Bomback, guilty of writing for Die Hard 4.0, Unstoppable, Race to Witch Mountain, Total Recall and The Wolverine, no great movies but entertaining enough. Dawn... follows the same spirit as the first movie but with a completely new human cast. This plus the fact that we spend the majority of the time with the Apes has the funny effect that we relate more to them than to the humans. We see them as an organized society, family men, including their doubts and internal conflicts, and good Apes and bad Apes like there are usually in movies good humans and bad humans. This inversion of roles is for me the major success in the film, together with the great performance of the Ape cast (body and facial motion capture of actors including the unmissable Andy "Gollum" Serkis). The Special effects (the Apes mainly) are well done but sometimes too smooth to be true. I prefer the more jerked motions of the aliens in District 9 for example, although I admit it is not fair to compare them with effects that reproduce real living beings. War of the Planet of the Apes is in preparation, but I fear that it will take more than three movies to get to the story of the original one, and that fear was confirmed by a recent interview of Andy Serkis to MTV.
Rating: 7 /10