- #Common sense media rise of the planet of the apes movie
- #Common sense media rise of the planet of the apes plus
(That’s some serious blowback from animal testing!) A band of perhaps several hundred naturally immune humans, led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman: RoboCop, Paranoia), has been holed up in the now overgrown ruins of San Francisco, and now they’re starting to venture up into the hills outside the city, hoping to get a hydroelectric dam operating again now that the fuel they’ve been using to run generators is about to go dry.
![common sense media rise of the planet of the apes common sense media rise of the planet of the apes](https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/War-for-the-Planet-of-the-Apes-banner.jpg)
It’s ten years on from the events of the first film, and humanity has been all but wiped out by a “simian flu,” a virus that was being tested on chimps by human scientists but escaped the lab and mutated. Mistrust born of old pain is the only true enemy here, and it infects both the apes and the humans. There are no real villains, only people - I use the word in the widest sense - who have been traumatized beyond their capacity to heal.
#Common sense media rise of the planet of the apes movie
(If you don’t want to have to consider the possibility that at least some “animals” should not be treated like objects and property, you could even call this movie propagandistic.) It’s not humans versus apes here. But the notion that Caesar and his people - a large band of chimps, gorillas, and lonely orangutan Maurice (mo-capped Karin Konoval: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Diary of a Wimpy Kid), the original group of whom had escaped from a research facility - do not deserve to live as they choose is impossible to extract from the story that Dawn is telling without it collapsing entirely.
#Common sense media rise of the planet of the apes plus
Of course there are no real chimpanzees like Caesar (CGI plus the motion-captured performance of Andy Serkis: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Arthur Christmas), who became an ape genius (in the first film) via a drug intended to cure brain diseases in humans. It is such a joy to know that someone - in this case, director Matt Reeves ( Let Me In, Cloverfield) and screenwriters Mark Bomback ( The Wolverine, Total Recall) and the team of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, returning from the first film - cares about this kind of thing, and cares enough to make it work in a film that still satisfies in every way we’ve come to expect from our summer blockbusters. And it’s something cinematic SF very rarely bothers with.
![common sense media rise of the planet of the apes common sense media rise of the planet of the apes](https://media.wired.com/photos/59327645edfced5820d10aec/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/chimp_vocal-2.jpg)
This is what science fiction is supposed to do: make you see the world in a new way, and see that the way things are are not inevitably the way things must be. It’s a magnificent science-fictional problem that is thrilling to consider not only because it borders on the science-factual - there are movements in the real world to extend personhood to other higher primates and to cetaceans - but because this sort of philosophical thinking is so rarely woven into the cloth of blockbuster genre films. The problem of what to call this wider awareness of our world and our place in it, and our extension of dignity and self-determination to nonhumans, is a good problem. Because there are nonhumans here who are as fully people as the humans are… in fact, the story is very much about the humans coming to terms with the incontrovertible fact that they are no longer the only creatures on the planet who are intelligent and self-aware, who have a culture, a history, and hopes for the future. People-ist is the first coinage that leaps to mind, clunky as it is. But now it feels too small to encompass where Dawn of the Planet of the Apes takes the ongoing story. That was a word I used to describe the lovely, honest, sensitive Rise of the Planet of the Apes - and god, did it feel good to be able to connect those words with a big-budget science fiction movie.
![common sense media rise of the planet of the apes common sense media rise of the planet of the apes](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pbblogassets/uploads/2017/06/caesar.jpg)
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)