The 21st century has seen multiple film franchises rebooted. Probably one of the best so far is the new Planet of the Apes. The first one, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is probably the best film so far by James Franco, was the Hollywood breakout film for Bollywood star Freida Pinto, and another epic performance by British actor Andy Serkis. With such a great movie, the expectations for the second outing of the franchise were high, and this film met it. Unlike the first film, which is primarily about the journey of one ape, Caesar, living among humans, this film is about the uneasy coexistence of two societies, ape and man, that degrades into an all-out war. The movie starts out slow, with glimpses of the ape society living in the Redwood forest outside of the Bay Area of California. Then comes a violent encounter with a group of humans that slowly escalates the violent tendencies in both the human and ape society. The rest of the movie is a series of character studies, looking at how the proponents of peace counter the proponents of war in both the human and ape societies. The film ends with Caesar barely holding onto power among the apes, and foreshadows the third movie as about all-out war.

I put off watching this for a long time because I felt it would be too heavy. That ended up being true but I do not regret watching it.

By heavy, I mean like Gladiator, a pretty intense movie that is very well done but takes its toll on you (because it is so well done). By contrast a light movie would be something like transformers, where you just go to see stuff blow up and don't care about any of the characters or if any of them die.

Rise was a good slower-paced lead-in to this movie. Dawn picks up two years after that with the apes minding their own business in the woods just north of San Francisco. Caesar is leading a rather large band of apes and they have their own little village with baby apes and everything. They say they haven't seen humans in a while and wonder if they are all just gone.

Of course, in the next scene, a band of humans stumble upon them and want to just take what they need. They still view the apes as "animals" and some even blame them for the "Simian Flue" that all but wiped out humanity. One human thinks that just going in and killing a village of sentient beings isn't really a cool thing to do. Despite his and Caesar's best attempts to keep things civil, conflict ensues (due to butt-heads on both sides).

Caesar is an amazing character played by amazing mo-cap actor Andy Serkis. How Serkis and Reeves can convey exactly how powerful (strong, compassionate, and intelligent) a being he is, while hardly talking is just awesome.

Side note, I just saw War last night and I cannot praise the people enough that were involved in these movies. While Rise was a fine movie, I really think that Matt Reeves really raised the bar with his two sequels.

My favorite film in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series. This is close to a perfect movie. Andy Serkis' work as Caesar is unreal, with the apes standing front and center as the main characters. The CG lends a credibility to these characters that surpasses the believability of the original films' costumes and masks. The only weak participant in the film is Jason Clarke as Malcolm. While every other actor is turning in phenomenal performances, he's just...there. I don't know, his acting skills are put to shame by his co-stars. Luckily, the apes matter much more in the film, and it pays off. This is a fantastic piece of work that I recommend to anyone. I think it's much better than Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and fairly better than War for the Planet of the Apes. It's the best in the trilogy and deserves respect as a piece of cinema. I still love the original from 1968, it had the best twist I'd ever seen, and it's still a great movie, but I didn't feel for the characters as much as I did in Dawn. It's truly amazing.

The best thing about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is that it sets up Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The best thing about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is that it sets up War for the Planet of the Apes. The trilogy gets better as it goes, both story-wise and visually. But unlike a lot of trilogy second acts, Dawn works on its own. Its basic weakness is that what could have been a really good first contact story, a tragedy of miscommunication and mistaken assumptions, is instead a simpler, less interesting story driven by bad guys.

Andy Serkis is amazing in this, the motion capture combined with his acting makes this movie feel "realistic". There are a few scenes that I couldn't help but giggle about (apes on horses) but for the most part the story was really well written and the cinematography fantastic. Watch it with an open mind and you may be pleasantly surprised.