Dawn of The Planet of the Apes Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition on Infinite Wisdom.  I am your host El Guapo, or as I'm better known south of the border, El Guapo.  Over the weekend I had the pleasure of catching the release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  I was really excited to write my review but seeing as the World Cup was yesterday I didn't want to release a blog post that would be dwarfed by all the World Cup news.  It's like announcing you lost your tooth at a funeral.  For some reason people just won't care.  (Yeah Mom!)  Also I was to busy watching the game/sulking after the game to even write.  But I'm here now so let's get this bad boy going.

Plot

Very well written screenplay by the writers.  As I've said before, you need to have a solid plot in order to avoid being a Michael Bay movie.  (Had this movie been directed by Bay, there probably would have been more explosions, less meaningful dialogue, less character development and complexity, and there would definitely have been a young attractive girl.)  The plot was complex but easy to follow.  The movie had a message and the story kept you interested.  The people who wrote this screenplay also wrote Rise of the Planet of the Apes so I wasn't surprised about how well this was written.  (I praised the writers in my review of Godzilla.)  Also, seeing as the same people are writing Jurassic World I'm pretty damn excited.  This is how you do sci-fi movies!

Characters

If anything this movie is about the characters and their relationships.  Yeah, we could talk about the human characters but the real stars were the apes.  It's about the relationships between the apes and the relationships between two different "peoples".  Once you're watching the movie you forget that you're watching two apes talk to each other in sign language.  You see a father talking wisdom to his son.  You forget that you're seeing an intelligent chimp and a human trying to communicate each other, you instead see two different people trying to establish trust.  Of course there's always someone to fuck things up for everybody.  In the human camp, it's a nervous guy who breaks ape/human trust  because he lets fear get the best of him.  On the apes side it's Koba, the right hand man (chimp) of Caesar, whom we all remember from the first film.  Here's the interesting thing about this movie: there's really no truly evil villain.  Follow me on this one.  As bad as all of Koba's actions are, he thinks he's doing what's best for his "people".  He gets power hungry and all that shit in the process, but I really think he had good-ish intentions.  He endured tough experiences with humans and therefore was never able to trust them.  (But to be real, Koba did some really fucked up things.  Don't worry, no spoilers!)  And like I said when I reviewed Godzilla, it makes for a better sci-fi movie when there's less focus on a romance.  On a side note, how adorable was Maurice!?!  I might name my first born child after the orangutan.

Aesthetics

Obviously with these types of movies you really want to emphasize on things like CGI and battle scenes and what not.  This one is a no-brainer.  Great stuff.  Battle sequences were on point, whether it was ape on ape or ape on human.  (That sounded dirty.)  The apes looked really good and it all helped in the process of forgetting you were seeing talking apes.  This was CGI done right with so much attention to detail.  It makes you wonder why so many sci-fi movies cheap out on the CGI bill.  It's like a burger joint cheaping out on the meat and getting discount patties.  Dawn is exactly what you want to see if you're looking for a great adventure/sci-fi movie to escape the dull world.  And more.

The Verdict

So it's pretty obvious this was a film I enjoyed.  The movie started good and as time went on escalated to its great status.  It was about 30 minutes in when I stopped thinking, "This is a pretty good movie."  It was then my mind went, "Damn, this movie is amazing!"  I didn't have super high expectations as I did with Godzilla.  But Dawn really delivered.  Being that these two movies are in the same genre I have to compare them.  While Godzilla is probably the film I was most excited for, I have to fair and give the nod to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  So seeing as I gave Godzilla a Guapisimo for a sci-fi/adventure movie, I have to do the same for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Thank you for reading this review.  Follow me on Twitter @ELGUAPO3 and Instagram @CAPTAINCRUNCHTIME.  Have a great day and stay Guapo out there!