Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Planet of the Apes franchise is so clearly established that it can be inflected for current issues. Each new version mirrors its time.

Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the PA makes our first identification with the apes, not the humans. The first episode bares the savagery in nature, as apes hunt down deer and fight off a grizzly. This is nature, red in tooth and claw and redder in 3-D. Still, we also get our first sense of the apes’ humanity, in their leader Caesar’s sensitivity to his son and his gratitude to the ape who kills the bear. The human father/son story feels undeveloped beside this one.

When the humans are introduced they’re intruders in that ape world. A thoughtless rifle shot suggests they might be even more murderous than the apes. As the two forces are defined the gap between animal and human narrows. The wise old orangutan (properly named Maurice) can read and teaches the young to read. He also conveys a morality that makes these apes superior to most of these humans: “Ape does not kill ape.”  When the villain ape Koba does, he forces Caesar to one of the two key lines of the film: “I didn’t realize how much like us [the humans] are.” Caesar’s assumption of his species’ moral superiority is undermined by his rival’s evil.

The other key line is Caesar’s warning to good human Malcolm: The humans won’t forgive the apes for the war Koba started. Caesar forgave Koba his first insurrection, which only encouraged the second. Their world in ruins, Caesar disqualifies Koba — “You are not ape.” — so he can drop him to his death. But the humans’ inability to forgive augurs a continuing cycle of violence, murder and destruction — i.e., on the brighter side, a few sequels; but in real life, the end of civilization as we knew it.

Certainly Koba’s cunning shows him superior to the drinking arrogant guards he tricks. As the humans note, the apes are not as dependent as the humans upon outside power sources. They’re stronger and they have genetically evolved. On both sides there are are good and there are bad characters. But in the post-plague world, in which humanity has shrunk to small bands of isolated survivors, the apes seem to be starting evolution all over again. Win or lose these apes expose the failure of humanity.

     Those three key lines make the film a clear reflection upon the present human landscape. All over the world, humans are killing humans. That is, they lack these apes’ principle. They also deny their kinship to their victims, how alike they are, how trivial their mortal differences. And worse: they don’t forgive. Wherever humans are killing humans these days you find inhumanity in action and long-festering differences magnified to justify slaughter. The apes’ dawn is our miserable midnight.