Watching this I kept wishing that they'd make a cable TV Game of Thrones style version of the Apes story because there's so much complexity and depth you could go into which this film skims over - in part because they're making something that's feature length, but also because the complexity (I couldn't help feeling) was outside what they were willing to go into.
This movie get big points for not selling out on some key issues - the human race has been mostly wiped out, the apes are very sympathetic, it's not easy goodies-and-baddies, the most fanatical people on each side (Koba and Gary Oldman) are given entirely understandable motives, the effects are truly magnificent (as are the locations and scenes such as the apes galloping on horseback), it has some interesting things to say on guns/violence/war/interspecies trust, it's not dumb.
But it fumbles in other areas - the depiction of females (they just breed and that's it in ape land, and Kerri Russell is a smurfette character for the humans); the lack of complexity amongst the human characters (why was Kodi Smitt-McPhee in this film? What purpose did he serve? Could Jason Clarke and Russell not have been given something more meaty to play than "decent everyman"?); the fact the climax came down to not the first, or the second but the third fight between Caesar and Koba; the convenient stupidity of the human strategy which has them store the armoury outside their defensive walls and not put up any guards.
The acting for the most part is competent rather than inspired but Andy Serkis is magnificent.
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