thoughts on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the predecessor to this film, most of the humans' troubles come from their own stupidity, arrogance, and general disrespect for and misunderstanding of animals.  Here, the humans are mostly good people, and the hyper-intelligent apes that populate the woods near San Francisco are generally peaceful and good-natured as well...but there are loose cannons in both groups that make it clear that any peace that currently exists between humans and apes is tenuous at best.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens with a montage of news clips that inform us that much of the human population has been wiped out by the "simian flu" that was introduced at the end of Rise.  A small group living in what remains of San Francisco wanders into the apes' territory near the beginning of the film hoping to use the dam on their land to get their power going so that they can try to establish contact with other survivors.  They get off on the wrong foot, though, when one moron (Carver, played by Kirk Acevedo) gets trigger-happy and shoots the apes' leader's son.  No one is actually killed in the skirmish, and fortunately, the apes' leader (Caesar, the ape raised by James Franco's character in Rise, played by Andy Serkis) is peaceful; however, Koba (Toby Kebbell) is definitely not, and he wants war with the humans.  A few of the humans (Malcolm, Ellie, and Alex, played by Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, respectively) manage to broker a tentative peace with Caesar and are allowed to do the work they need to do.  However, unrest between Caesar and Koba, as well as the fact that there are a number of humans who don't understand why they're negotiating with apes in the first place; who are scared of the apes; and/or who don't really give a crap how many apes they hurt while accomplishing their goals pretty much ensures that the humans and apes won't be living in harmony for long.

I enjoyed the previous film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, even though much of what happened in that film was completely ridiculous, with even the "good" characters doing things that were so stupid as to almost be unbelievable.  Here, though some people do bad things, their actions usually at least somewhat make sense, given the circumstances.  I will also give this film credit for taking longer than I expected before devolving into mad, human-on-ape battle, and at least keeping something of a real story going even after the film does go there.  Though Dawn makes more sense and is probably an objectively better film than Rise, though, I kind of felt like it was missing something.  Some reviews have pointed out that we pretty much know going in how the whole thing is going to end, so perhaps suspense is the missing element.  We are also missing any relationships with the depth of what we saw between Will (James Franco) and Caesar in the first film; Malcolm and Ellie make friends with Caesar in this movie, but the whole thing (with the exception of the backstory set up at the beginning) takes place over just a few days.  The first film took place over the course of literally years, so we got to see the relationships progress and change; here, we get that the humans have forged relationships and even makeshift families in the aftermath of the simian flu, but we didn't get to see those relationships form, and so much of the characters' interaction takes place in the midst of action that the relationships stay pretty shallow for us as an audience.

I thought it was just okay.  There were some good things about it, but overall, I felt like it was missing a lot of the emotional depth of Rise.