No monkey business in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

In this uncommonly sure-handed fusion of computer-generated and live-action images, apes are the more fully realised, expressive characters.

Andy Serkis as Caesar in a scene from the film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Director: Matt Reeves

Starring: Andy Serkis, Keri Russell, Jason Clarke

Three stars

Digital characters have by now long populated our movies like unwanted house guests. Some of these CGI inventions, such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, have been pleasant, even precious, company. But most have disrupted our movie worlds – and not just as monsters tearing our cities apart, but as awkward distractions to our cinematic realities. The name Jar Jar Binks will forever be followed by solemn head shaking. Never forget.

But in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the tables have turned, and not just because apes now rule a world where all but one in 500 humans have been wiped out by a so-called simian flu virus. No, the biggest uprising in the sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes is by those digitally created, non-human characters that have finally and resoundingly come of age. Hail Caesar.

That's the ape played by Andy Serkis, the motion-capture maestro of creatures such as Gollum and a much bigger ape, Kong. Serkis played Caesar in Rise of the Planet Apes, the surprisingly good origin story of the rebooted Apes franchise wherein chimps, injected with a serum meant to cure human brain damage, develop great intelligence.

Caesar was a fine character then, but in Dawn, he shifts to centre stage.

It’s 10 years after the last film ended and Caesar is now a weary leader and firmly rooted family man with a wife, a teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and a new baby. Who gets credit for Caesar’s deep, troubled eyes, Serkis or the effects by Joe Letteri and Dan Lemmon? Does it matter?

Looking for a dam to restore power for a colony of human survivors, a group (Jason Clarke, Keri Russell) stumbles upon the monkeys’ Muir Woods home in the Redwoods outside San Francisco. The encounter sets off panic on both sides, as the firebrands in each community – the ape Koba, played by Toby ­Kebbell, and his human corollary, Gary Oldman – urge their species towards ­battle.

To a surprising degree, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes belongs to the monkeys. In the uncommonly sure-handed fusion of computer-generated and live-action images, apes are the more fully realised, expressive characters. Given that the apes communicate in sign language and spurts of English, this may be the biggest summer movie with so many subtitles.

Whereas Pierre Boulle's original Planet of the Apes was satirical, Reeves and screenwriters Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback have given this Apes the grandly gloomy Dark Knight treatment, complete with an exceptional score by Michael Giacchino.

The movie feeds off a sense that, given the state of the planet, a reordering of the animal kingdom may be due. There's a pervasive jealousy of the primates in Apes: their comfort in nature and simplicity of life. Audiences, in fact, will cheer the animals over the humans. And few will miss the gun control argument shallowly buried throughout the film. What would Charlton Heston have made of that?

But there’s also a question of putting too much gravity on an essentially absurd story. Eventually we have screaming monkeys on horseback firing automatic weapons amid roaring flames.

It's got to be a very familiar ploy in Hollywood to remake previously light, cheesy entertainments with well-crafted, heavy grandiosity. So if there's a failing of Apes, it's that it feels like yet another manufactured franchise. Talented people such as Reeves and Serkis are brought in like home makeover experts to restore mossy pop-culture properties.

But, alas, they’re very good at it.