Why the riveting latest installment in the Apes franchise shifts its focus to the primate side of the story.
Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
While motion capture king Andy Serkis gets top billing when the credits roll at the end of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you never see his flesh-and-blood face on screen. But, man, does he deserve it. As the performance behind Caesar, the leader of the band of brainy primates poised to take over the Earth, Serkis, along with a team of visual effects artists, has created a riveting character who is somewhere between human and animal, and who is shockingly convincing. Caesar may be a mostly computerized creation, but he has a soul.
Caeser, whose origins as a Gen-Sys scientist's test subject turned surrogate child were chronicled in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is middle-aged and a parent in this installment, dealing with overseeing a simian community in a world in which humanity is dying out. He's got a lot to deal with, including a resentful son (performed by Nick Thurston), and telegraphs to the audience a universe of complex emotions, mostly without the use of dialogue. He never once comes across like a computer puppet channeling the movements of an actor wearing a mocap body sock. He feels solid and real, a conflicted idealist trying to construct an ape Eden out in Muir Woods.
We've come a long way from the latex prosthetics (cutting edge at the time!) that were used in the original Planet of the Apes. Nifty technology and sharp, smart writing in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which opens nationwide on July 11, make it easy to surrender to the idea of a primate population eclipsing the straggling remnants of mankind, most of which was wiped out by the same manufactured virus that boosted the intelligence of the apes. Its enhanced chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans aren't humans playing at being animals — they are animals, and they're not all that sure that humans are what they want to emulate.
David James/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
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