Dawn of the planet of the apes Review

Michael Bay kept describing T4 as “epic” and T4 was many things but epic wasn’t one of them,  just because you blow up more stuff and do it on a bigger scale doesn’t make a film epic, epic requires emotion, there can’t be spectacle if you don’t care about the characters involved, this is where DOTPOTA succeeds. The film is beautiful to look at, the rainy greys of San Francisco paint a really dark future. The CGI is the greatest I’ve seen, I had to remind myself I wasn’t looking at actual apes. The motion capture has come on so much that it really enables the actors who play the apes to completely become their characters, and the performances are some of the best I’ve seen, Andy Serkis’ Caeser and Toby Kebbel as Koba are two spellbinding performances. This is easily the most intelligent blockbuster you’ll see all summer, but when the spectacle comes it doesn’t skimp in the slightest and its thrilling stuff. Where it loses marks however is the human characters, the performances are all a marked improvement on ROTPOTA, but the characters themselves seem a little short changed in comparison to the apes, for the most part I found them quite dull, but it would take a bigger disaster than that to ruin this film. (Low 5 Stars)