We all know blockbusters are getting longer, but if only the bloat were restricted to the films. Their titles if anything are even worse, and franchise sequels are the number one culprits.
Slotting in alongside Transformers: Age Of Extinction and the upcoming Avengers: Age Of Ultron is Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, the sequel to 2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. At least the new film, directed by Matt Reeves, banishes the colon.
Dawn jettisons James Franco to focus instead on the ape he reared in the previous film, Caesar (Andy Serkis). Caesar is now the leader of a simian horde living in the woods above San Francisco. It’s been 15 years since a virus wiped out most of the human population. Survivors hole up in a shanty town cobbled together in the heart of the otherwise abandoned city centre, and ape and man live oblivious to each other on either sides of the Golden Gate Bridge.
We know they’ll clash, but it’s a credit to Reeves that exactly how it boils over still feels organic and unexpected. Reeves wrote Under Siege 2, as well as James Gray’s superb The Yards, but he’s still probably best known for Felicity, which he co-created with J.J. Abrams. Like Abrams, Reeves’ feature career is defined by the stylish reheating of dishes already cooked – Star Trek for Abrams, Let The Right One In for Reeves. His debut feature Cloverfield was ostensibly an original, like Abrams’ Super 8, but both straddled the line where homage meets larceny.
So it’s remarkable that Dawn feels like the rare franchise movie with a real directorial signature. There are moments, as when an ape commandeers a tank and the camera swivels with its revolving gun turret as it spews fire, of pure, exhilarating style. Dawn triumphs by taking the opposite tack to what we’ve come to expect from studio popcorn. It doesn’t look like it was written or lit to a formula overseen by the ubiquitous ‘brain trust’, and it’s unafraid to ditch the quips.
Its scope is admirably humble, too; its heroes on a mission merely to survive, not save the world. And in its star, Caesar, this franchise has found a genuinely fascinating character. Convincingly conflicted, he has none of the contrived torment of so many other headliners. Like the film itself, he’s lean and mean, contained but pulsing with life.
Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is in cinemas now.
