The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Another disappointment:  I'd like to recommend, at least, one of the summer blockbuster movies to my readers and, so, in that hope, attended The Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014).  I've always had a weakness for Planet of the Ape films and, of course, recall vividly the first picture in the franchise, The (original) Planet of the Apes with Charleton Heston crouching to curse mankind under the turquoise torso of the half-buried Statue of Liberty -- that movie made an indelible impact on me and several of the successor films were also reasonably amusing and, indeed, I thought The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the inaugural movie in the current cycle, was pretty good:  the interaction between the humans and monkeys was touching, the subtext involving a medication thought to aid Alzheimer's patients had a certain melancholy resonance, and the final battle between the apes and humans on the fog-girt Golden Gate Bridge was exciting and effective.  But, alas, the sequel, although reasonably coherent by big-budget action standards, is only okay.  And "only okay" on this scale -- a film probably costing several hundred million dollars is not good enough; in fact, "only okay" on this scale is, more or less, lousy.  The movie's plot concerns a band of humans attempting to restore electrical power at a hydro-electric dam somewhere in Marin County.  A virus, called Simian Flu, has wiped out almost all of humanity.  The surviving remnants are holed-up in the wreckage of San Francisco.  The humans encounter the apes living in a vast tree-house-like fort somewhere in the dense woods on Mount Tamalpais -- the fort is the first sign that the movie will be derivative and unnecessarily picturesque:  the ape's city looks like an outtake from The Lord of the Rings:  it has a wholly superfluous waterfall pouring through its suburbs, a waterfall incidentally that we never see in anything approaching a closer shot and that is pure Peter Jackson-style décor.  The apes are under the command of the wise Caesar, the benign Alpha male, and they have learned to communicate both by sign language and bellowing in a sort of pidgin English.  The apes are like the noble redskins in old cowboy and Indian movies -- they are courageous guerrilla fighters (pun intended) and they just want to be left in peace on their wilderness reservation.  Unfortunately, as is always the case, there are vicious renegades on both sides who seek to profit from conflict and the apes are duped into a war with the humans.  The apes launch an assault on San Francisco armed with machine guns and there is a spectacular fire-fight -- essentially an attack on Fort Apache by the monkeys who ride horses like shaggy versions of the Comanches or Sitting Bull's Sioux.  The apes win the battle, but, then, are confronted with an insurgency.  Planet of the Apes movies always mirror the political and social issues of the day and this picture is no exception -- no sooner is the battle for San Francisco (like the battle for Baghdad) complete, then, an insurgency erupts and apes fight apes while the humans battle one another as well.  Just as in Iraq, it turns out that there are extremist factions among the apes and civil war results from the conflict -- the humans are faced with the difficult decision of determining which faction to support in the insurgency.  The last thirty minutes of the movie is ridiculous, heaping coincidence upon coincidence, and much of the fighting takes place in typical CGI gloom seemingly required by large-scale, big-budget computer action sequences.  Typical to cowboy and Indian films, the white men (here the humans) have medicine on their side and can use their healing arts to form alliances with the savages (the primates).  Caesar, who has been shot by a renegade ape (the equivalent of the bad guy peddling firewater and Winchesters to the restive Sioux), requires surgery.  A plucky girl surgeon repairs his wounds, apparently with wonderful effectiveness, because only two days later he is duking it out with the wicked Koba on top of an immense tower of open girders -- a structure that seems to exist only to provide a colossal jungle-gym for the legion of primates.   There are lots of big explosions, bodies hurled through space, etc.  At first, the pictorial effects are impressive -- hundreds of apes swinging through trees in a misty forest -- but, ultimately, the result is numbing.  It may be worth it for you to pay $6.00 to see Koba charging barricades on horseback, firing machine guns with both hands, just like John Wayne with his two six-shooters blazing at the climax of True Grit and there are some dramatic images of the apes under attack by rocket launchers, the big gorillas laboring to drag off the wounded and dying smaller primates in a hellish inferno of orange explosions.  One shot involving a 360 degree motion of a tank turret, the camera mounted on the swiveling weapon to reveal writhing swarms of apes is extremely impressive, although in a computer video game, Medal of Honor way.  The movie is highly schematic -- the crosscutting between humans and apes is cartoonish and the film exploits a narrative device that was old when D. W. Griffith made his films:  two parallel families, one ape and one human, struggling to survive:  this allows for sentimental sequences of such bathos that they would have embarrassed Griffith almost a hundred years ago.  Unlike many films of this sort, the picture makes sense and the narrative is reasonably clear.  There are innumerable implausibilities -- the horseback assault of the apes, with the primates firing automatic weapons straight ahead of them, seems to be a strategy that would result in decimating the front ranks of the primate shock troops by friendly fire.  Furthermore, the director can't seem to manage a coherent scene of expository dialogue -- an early sequence involving six characters in a jolting truck talking to one another is completely mishandled:  the shots cross the eye-line repeatedly, violating the 180 degree rule, and the spatial dimensions of the sequence are botched.  The director can manage huge sequences involving hundreds of apes swinging back and forth rhythmically in the skeleton of a collapsing skyscraper but he can't effectively stage a dialogue sequence shot in a moving vehicle.  The worst lapse in this movie is that it is almost completely humorless -- the original Planet of the Apes' films were sly comedies; the action sequences were staged with a wink at the audience.  Too much money is at stake in this film and everything is presented with ponderous gravity.  (There is a nice moment when the power comes back on and someone plays a CD -- it's Levon Helm singing The Band's song "The Weight"; I've always liked that song.)