Reeves: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

The second film in the rebooted Apes frachise, Dawn is set several months after Rise. By this point, the simian flu has well and truly conquered the planet, leaving small enclaves of genetically immune humans and genetically modified apes in its wake. When two of these enclaves come into contact on the outskirts of San Francisco, a series of uneasy conciliatory gestures gives way to full-blown warfare, and a more traditional action-adventure film than Rise. Although the battle is long and bloody, the drama’s really driven by the backdrops, which make over San Francisco with the post-apocalyptic tastefuless of some of the best recent video games – The Last of Us comes to mind – taking particular advantage of its canyons and undulations, which feel quite interchangeable with the vertiginous trees and mountains where the apes make their homes. Against that gamescape, movement and apprehension tends to be vertical – at least half the film consists of people and apes looking up or down at each other – while the emotional kernel is also vertical, a succession of climaxes and catharses that continually propels us up to the next emotional platform. As heavy-handed and overwrought as that can be, it results in some of the most startling moments of simian melodrama since Gorillas in the Mist, as we’re continually brought face to face with faces that seem to defy the distinction between real and animated footage, or between human and animal expression. That was also what made Rise so memorable, but it’s somehow more lurid and spectacular here, precisely because the emotional range and sophistication of Dawn is far more limited and prepackaged – at its strongest, it is like seeing the most predictable blockbuster emotions, emotions so streamlined that you hardly register them, played out in their entirety by a cast of hominids. And there’s something quite audacious about how blithely it assumes your affinity with the ape universe, how matter-of-factly it extracts sentiment from even the most synthetic apescapes, building upon the originality of Rise even as it achieves a completely different kind of originality.