
Planet of the apes motion capture gif movie#
The apes might have found a television and DVD player, and in the player would have been a Die Hard movie or one of those John Wayne cavalry Westerns, and when Koba arrived at Fort Point, his horse would have reared up and he would have said something like “Yippee ki-yay.” But the movie goes for the surrealism of the image and not the joke. The apes are guerrillas.Ī different film - an apocalyptic commentary on bellicosity and assimilation and how the Centers for Disease Control cannot hold - might have gone for a gag about apes, horses, and guns, like dogs playing poker. And that’s inane: At the very least, it should be the other way around.) In any case, the animals have taken on a human militancy, and the movie lets the scariness of the transition sink in. (The climax of the new Transformers movie has a similar incongruity: trucks riding dinosaurs. A chimp on a horse holding an AK-47 is nuts. Smith to make certain kinds of gun ownership seem insane. This is the first Hollywood movie since Mr. What follows is a fight for electrical, military, and physical power, one that sees the apes eventually armed and massed. He has a point, and not because he’s the hawk to Caesar’s dove, but because dominion is what humans do. Koba argues that, in the long run, compassion will lead to conquest, and the conquest will lead to war. The humans’ request for help ignites a debate among the apes. The trespassers from San Francisco have come looking for a dam that will restore the city’s electricity, easing life in their compound, perhaps connecting them to the outside world and, with any luck, to their Apple products.

“Here we go,” he and Koba seem to say - but in opposition to each other. It’s just a wound, but this is the sort of deliriously detail-oriented production that invites you to detect exasperated worry in the folds of Caesar’s brow. (Gary Oldman holds down the fort in San Francisco.) One guy gets aggravated and antsy and shoots one of the apes. Their philosophical differences remain theoretical until some men (Jason Clarke, Kirk Acevedo, Kodi Smit-McPhee) and a woman (Keri Russell) come trespassing in the woods. They were tortured, which is unforgivable. They pat their bodies and paint the air, as Caesar says that he remains ambivalent toward people and Koba says that he does not. The elder ape enjoys deep, subtitled sign-language discussions about humans with his friend Koba. Caesar’s biggest headache is his rebellious adolescent son. Humans are languishing in primitivity, while the apes are wrestling with more civilized concerns. What’s left of San Francisco’s population is now packed into Fort Point. Eventually, the projects strike back and then out into the forest where, a decade later, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, they’ve evolved in a nice, if rainy, fiefdom.Īs for Homo sapiens, the search for that cure unleashed a virus that has decimated most of the world. It was a horror movie - a sensitive, intelligent, outraged, suspenseful one with disturbingly good visual effects - that started as a family film: a doctor searching for a cure to his father’s Alzheimer’s works for a company that goes too far. The movies came fully back to life in 2011, when Rise of the Planet of the Apes posed moral and ethical concerns to the animal-testing corner of the medical community by dramatizing the stress of life as a science project. Tim Burton tried to resurrect it in 2001 without really knowing why.
Planet of the apes motion capture gif series#
The series started in 1968, as a Charlton Heston vehicle that used its interspecies strife to mirror all kinds of political strife outside the theater. But that’s the unstated tension in these new Planet of the Apes movies: We’re this close to being their monkeys. Seeing scores of monkeys pulling on reins forces you to accept the inversion of order, and maybe breathe a sigh of relief.

You experience wonder and a reasonable approximation of dread. On the other, you’re watching the Meryl Streep of motion-capture technology. On the one hand, you’re watching the computer-generated synthesis of a very good, very particular sort of acting with state-of-the-art technology. Maybe you know that Andy Serkis is “playing” the apes’ leader, Caesar. But you surrender to the point where you’re no longer aware of the digital wizardry. The place is San Francisco, the horsemen apes, and the line vague between what’s real and what’s computer-made. And so into the city they rode, on horseback, with machine guns and exposed fangs and grunts, and stood with spears atop rusting cable cars, looking first for something like peace and, later, for war.
