by Christopher Barr
"Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a thrilling, well put together film about the conflict of war
within one self and then manifesting itself upon the world. With astonishing CGI and high performances,
this film is a story about Caesar, the leader of the tribe of apes that escaped
a simian, holding facility hellhole and fled to the Red Wood Forest to seek
refuge from their cruel overlords, humans.
In their village, Caesar
leads a peaceful bunch of apes, he has a family and his partner has just given
birth to their second son. His eldest
son was just recently clawed by a bear during a hunting expedition, but other than
that, things are pretty peaceful for Caesar.
Enter the humans who want
access to a Dam facility to fix the generators and give power back to the apocalyptic
city of San Francisco, where some of the remaining human beings are
residing. For the past ten years, the
humans have been dying by the millions by a deadly virus that has only left a
few untouched by its horrifying symptoms.
The humans just want things
to go back to the way things were before the virus, which is itself a fool’s error. After a fallout with the apes, some of the
humans believe that they need to go to war with the apes to gain access to the
Dam facility that is located in ape territory.
Caesar’s conflict here is his love for some of the humans while the
majority of the, well over hundred, apes want nothing to do with them, and some
yet want to kill them.
Rise of The Planet of the Apes was primarily about
family, it was about protecting our loved ones and it was about compassion for
life. It was also about cruelty, confinement and captivity; it was about
abandonment and fear. This film explores our capacity for change even
when that change can be scary. It also about our affinity for intolerance
and our need for control above all other life forms on this planet. The
unfortunate reality explored in this film is that we don’t want to share
because we are too afraid.
Caesar is an ape with a higher brain function than
most people. Even among his primate peers, after they are chemically
enhanced, Caesar is exceptional; he is a leader and an innovator. Above
all, he’s a freedom fighter, he longs for the freedom of the jungle, swinging
from tree to tree, without the barricading of doors, windows, cages and human
beings telling him what he can and cannot do.
Rise is about revolution
where Dawn is about fighting to keep that freedom
after the revolution. In Rise,
Caesar starts out as an orphan, an outsider, a refugee of sorts resulting from
an incident at a genetics research facility that ended in the death of his
mother. The laboratory was conducting experiments to enhance neurological
activity in the brain in hopes that one day; the research could result in
discovering a cure for Alzheimer’s.
The experimental drug, called the 112 virus, that
Caesar’s mother was forced to take was passed to him genetically, making him
technically, the only one of his kind. He is truly alone even though he
is staying with a loving family. His species are social animals who long
for connection but he cannot quite make that connection. He is hidden
away in an attic and taken to the forest every now and then. Not because
his family is cruel but because the world is cruel and wouldn’t accept such a large
intelligent being like Caesar to live among them. This goes back to the
fear of change that most people live by.
Caesar becomes incarcerated for trying to protect his
Alzheimer’s older family member, a man equivalent to a grandfather. To an
intellectual being like Caesar, he’s all too aware that the place that he ends
up in is madhouse, a madhouse of apes that all are animalistic by nature.
For someone like him, this is one hell of a scary place but it’s this place,
and it’s true lack of freedom, that pushes Caesar to his limits and forces him
to “rise” and fight this totalitarian system to get his freedom. He
realizes that in order to do this, he’s going to need an army, so he steals a
couple of cans of the virus and wakes up all the apes, galvanizing them.
He leads them to revolt and then escape, crossing the city of San Francisco to
a heavy red wooded forest.
Civilization was left with a viral pandemic known as
“Simian Flu”, of their own misguided creation and no known cure, which spread
across the globe to all major cities and where containment was all but lost.
It escalates to the point when a mere one in ten survive the virus, then
one in a thousand, then one in a million, with human race nearly becoming
extinct, essentially by their progress-addicted meddling hands.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is about survival of
the fittest, it’s about a war on exclusion and extension. This film is also about the dismaying dangers
of group/mob mentality and how reason and logic often falls to the wayside. Caesar is a Martin Luther King Jr.-type
figure where his interest is in peace for now and for the future. Koba, a scary grimacing looking ape, follows
Caesar’s lead but doesn’t agree with his politics. Koba thinks that humans need to pay for what
they did to the apes, but more importantly for Koba, they need to pay for what
they did to him. He wants revenge much
in the same way as Magneto from the X-Men series wanted revenge for what humans
did to mutants.
The mob mentality in the film both demonstrated by the
humans and more so by the apes, consists of the idea that becoming a member of
a crowd serves to unlock the unconscious mind.
This occurs because the super-ego, or moral center of consciousness, is
displaced by the larger crowd, to be replaced by a shared emotional experience that
is often guilt-free. In the film fear is what ignites this crowd
mentality, which Koba is well aware of as he betrays Caesar. The apes are willing to follow his lead
without question because they are scared and want to live, so as a result they
follow. Personal responsibility is far
less relevant in a crowd; here the emotions heightened by a potential war with
the humans move the crowd to unquestion their motives and to follow Koba on a
killing spree of revenge. Koba, like
Hitler, manipulates the ape population into believing there is a threat when no
immediate threat exists. Koba has a
personal vendetta to settle and enlists Caesar’s army to fight for him, along
with manipulating Caesar’s son along the way.
Caesar, a utilitarian, doesn’t want war but yet has to
fight to keep the peace. As the mutiny
escalates, Caesar has to get harsh in order to maintain civility among his kind. This film, in that regard resembles most wars
fought in the last thousand years. The
humans want power, a resource that is located on ape territory, so like the
conflict in the middle east over oil, the humans aim to go in and take what
they need and start a war to do it.
This film never loses sight of the fact that the humans
are in the wrong here and the apes, at least toward the beginning, are the
victims. As individuals, it appears that
peace talks are possible but as groups, it is simply us against them. So in the end, Caesar, much in the same way
as the Godfather, has to go to war, not because he wants too but because he has
too. This is the sad tragedy of human
beings when they are in such groups, they show their true nature. They lose what civilization has worked so
hard to preserve - intelligence. Caesar
needs to protect his family because he is the father; he needs to protect his
fellow apes because he is the alpha male.
But the time for logic and reason has unfortunately past, like in our world;
war is the devolution of thinking things through, it’s the devolution of
societal evolution. Caesar has to drop
to their level in order to survive and to help preserve his species for future
generations, to live peaceful on a planet filled with apes.
No comments:
Post a Comment