While watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes , it occurred to me that this film is to its predecessor ( Rise of the Planet of the Apes ) what The Godfather: Part II is to The Godfather . Let’s begin with the tone. Rise was well-written, well-crafted, and (in the case of Andy Serkis’s genetically mutated ape named Caesar) supremely well-acted, but for all its emotional resonance, it was essentially a popcorn movie. And all Dawn needed to be was more of the same. All it needed to do was set up another apes-versus-humans battle.
We get that, but we get more. It’s not as easy as apes=good, humans=bad. There are good apes and bad apes, good humans and bad humans. Like The Godfather: Part II , Dawn is a deeper, more resonant, more complex and more ambitious spin on an earlier hit. A lot of it unfolds in near-silence, over the grunts of apes, as they communicate through sign language, over subtitles. Can you recall the last “summer blockbuster” that had subtitles? Or the last one that was so... quiet ? I can’t.
Like The Godfather: Part II , Dawn takes a world we’ve become accustomed to and casts a gloomy shadow over it. There’s no triumphalism here – nobody wins . And if The Godfather: Part II gave us two sets of families – Michael and Co. in the present; the young Don Corleone in the past – Dawn , too, keeps alternating between Caesar’s family (his wife; his older son Blue Eyes; and his newborn, reminiscent of the Don’s infant son Fredo) and the family of the human named Malcolm, whose son is called Alexander.
Dawn parallels events between these two family units the way The Godfather: Part II did. Caesar’s infant scampers up to humans, without mistrust or hate; Alexander shares a book with an ape. Koba doesn’t trust humans; a human character doesn’t trust apes. Caesar’s wife is unwell; Malcolm’s wife is dead. And it’s Blue Eyes who delivered, at least to my eyes, the film’s most Godfather -esque moment, when he talks of a friend who was brutally murdered. It’s one of those speaking-through-tears moments, and it reminded me of Brando’s scene when he points to Sonny Corleone’s body and speaks through his tears: “Look how they massacred my boy.”The action-blockbuster ambitions of Dawn keep it from becoming too much like The Godfather movies – they were, after all, tragic dramas – but the parallels keep piling up. Both are basically gangland stories about protecting one’s turf. Both centre on “families.” (You could compare the ape colony to Don Corleone’s private estate.) And both films are less immediately... satisfying; it takes us a while to realise that the instant gratification, that ping to the brain’s pleasure centres, we got with the earlier films is in short supply here. At some level, the sequels are really meditations on morality and the evil that men do.
When Caesar is lying wounded, he brings to mind the stretch from the first Godfather film when the Don was shot and hospitalised – Caesar has the same dying-patriarch mien about him. Caesar’s son, Blue Eyes, is confused about his calling for a large part of the film – like Michael. But by the end, it’s Caesar who has become Michael Corleone. He’s finished off his enemy. He’s proved his supremacy. And the others bow before him and take his hand in a gesture of supplication. If Michael is betrayed by his brother Fredo, who plays a part in the assassination attempt that opens The Godfather: Part II , then Caesar is betrayed by his lieutenant Koba. Even the slow zoom-out from Caesar’s face at the beginning of Dawn echoes the slow zoom-out from Amerigo Bonasera’s face during the famous “I believe in America...” monologue from The Godfather .
I was also reminded, along the way, of Aboorva Sagotharargal / Appu Raja , when Koba monkeys around and disarms the enemy, before unleashing his fury on them. I was reminded of Goli Soda , which was a standard-issue masala movie made different because the roles were played by children – Dawn , too, is a gang-wars drama made different because some of the roles are played by apes. I was reminded of Apocalypse Now in the scene where Malcolm “goes native.” I was reminded of zombie thrillers when Malcolm enters enemy territory to retrieve a surgical kit. What I was not reminded of was any of the older Planet of the Apes movies, which carried the whiff of camp. Any film viewed decades after its making is doomed to be appraised by very different sets of eyes, and to our eyes, the earlier Apes films, for all their thrilling and affecting moments, seem distant. We’re unable to enter them the way we are absorbed by the new Apes films because we don’t suspend disbelief as much. With Rise and Dawn , with their sophisticated visual effects and motion-capture performances, disbelief isn’t just suspended – it’s blown out of the water.
We see Caesar and we recognise him the way we’d recognise a human actor by his face. Caesar’s face expresses tenderness and wonderment when his son is born. His eyes redden with sadness when his wife falls sick (you can almost imagine the late nights he’s been keeping, by her bedside), and those eyes deepen with pain and sorrow when he says that he was shot not by a man but by an ape. (“Ape did this.”) For all the successes of the new Apes films, their singular achievement is that we see apes on horses and don’t burst out snickering. We just look at the screen and think, “There go two apes on horses.”
Published - July 18, 2014 04:44 pm IST
