Theater Whore: Dawn of The Planet of The Apes

Dawn of The Planet Of The Apes 9/10

For the first time I had the pleasure of seeing a movie with Dashuh while she was visiting. I say pleasure not just because it was awesome to see her, but because she is a good person to see movies with. I have seen some movies with bad people. They can’t stay off their phone. Constantly getting up to use the bathroom (meaning check their phone). Or just can’t get into a movie. None of these things happened with her and that was great. After watching the first Planet Of The Apes we decided to head to Arclight in Hollywood and see the new Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes. When I say that this movie was damn near close to perfect I mean it. This is one of those movies that reminds me of why I love the whole movie going experience so much. This takes place in 2016 after a virus caused by the experiments from the first film start to wipe out humanity. If the virus didn’t kill you being a violent ass human being did.

Meanwhile in Muir Woods the apes are living it up. Caesar and his wife and son, Blue Eyes, are running things and getting along just fine. He has a new son and his “people” love and respect him. One day while out Blue Eyes and another ape encounter a human. The human freaks out and shoots the ape. Immediately the apes spring into action. The leader of the humans, Malcolm, and his crew are surrounded by the apes. He tells them to lower their guns and Caesar shouts “Go!!!” which freaks the humans right the fuck out. The head back home after failing their mission to try and get the power station up and running because back in San Francisco, which between this film and Godzilla is the place to wreck now, food is running low and they need power to get back on their feet.

Caesar leads a group of apes on horseback to the city, give the humans their backpack back, and tells them to stay here and out of the woods. Koba, who is the busted looking ape from the previous film, wants them to punish the humans because he knows that they will be back to hurt them. He feels this way because he has spent his life being experimented on. Caesar has more faith in humans because he was raised by a nice one.

Malcolm convinces the city’s leader to give him a few days to make nice with the apes and get the power on. This works for a while and the humans and apes are good together. That is until the asshole that shot the ape at the start sneaks a gun into the woods and almost attacks Caesar’s newborn son. They make up but lock the asshole in the car. The city eventually gets it power, the human woman helps save Caesar’s sick wife, and all is well until Koba sneaks into the city and sees that the humans are gearing up for a battle with the apes and decides to kill the guy in the car and assassinate Caesar and blame the humans for it. Now it is time for all out war between the apes and the humans in the city.

With Caesar gone and Koba now running the show they raid the armory and round up the humans into pens. They kill the ones that don’t give up easily and even begin to kill their own. Well, Koba does even though the first rule is that apes must not kill other apes. Caesar’s son knows this is fucked up but he and many others are too afraid to say anything to stop it.

This movie was super fun to watch. The way they have the apes communicate through sign language, sub titles, and actual speaking worked really well because they didn’t rely too much on one over the other. They blended it perfectly. The effects of this were so good that after a certain point I forgot that I was not watching real apes. What is strange about this story is that I didn’t know which side to root for. Dashuh and I had the same issue since it was like we are humans so fuck nature but...the humans were being dicks. It wasn't until Koba decided to run things that I thought “Oh, fuck these monkeys. Team People!” We decided not to see the 3D version of this and that is a thing I’m trying to stick to. I don’t think I missed out on much by not seeing this in 3D anyway. If you are in the mood to see a really good movie for sure check this out.

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