Dawn of The Planet of the Apes and the Divide between Reason and Chaos

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.