Movies

Newest ‘Planet of the Apes’ easily franchise’s best

That the movie isn’t called “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Humans Learning to Appreciate One Another’s Quirks” seems to be a giveaway, and yet this one is all about balance — between destruction and rebuilding, murder and birth, mistrust and allegiance. For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

The eighth “Planet of the Apes” movie is easily the best, suspenseful and scary and cured of the silliness that infused all previous iterations, even the 1968 original — a fun kids’ movie oddly anointed a classic when those kids grew up while retaining their childish tastes.

Years after a virus, unleashed in 2011’s far inferior “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” has killed off much of humankind and created a race of superintelligent apes living in a forest near San Francisco, the animals spot a group of humans for the first time in 10 years. The people (led by Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman and Kirk Acevedo) are hoping to gain access to a dam in the woods and supply power to a few hundred survivors in the city, which will otherwise soon run out of fuel.

The leader of the apes, Caesar (played with wonderful subtlety by Andy Serkis, merging beautifully with digital costumes), doesn’t trust humans, but he works with them to a degree found unacceptable by his chief lieutenant, Koba (played terrifyingly by Toby Kebbell). To Koba, who was tortured in the lab from which he and Caesar escaped in “Rise,” it would be best to make war on the humans before the humans launch a conflict. The angry ape has a legitimate grievance, which makes him one of the year’s most compelling movie villains, but his cruelty makes you remember that Koba was one of Stalin’s nicknames.

Instead of pushing any particular real-world analogy about groups of people mistrusting one another or humanity’s selfish war on nature, the movie smartly borrows a trick from many a great sci-fi film: It’s vague. You could read it as a parable about the dangers of guns, or of being caught off-guard. Nobody delivers a hack line meant to take out some easy political target.

Instead, there’s a classic Oldman roar — “They’re animals!” — that also reminds us that dismissing your enemy in such terms is rarely wise. A wave-the-bloody-shirt scene has many echoes in history, while a spasm of sudden, decisive violence is a shivery reflection of how dictatorships are born, always accompanied by the rounding up of political prisoners.

These haunting tableaux are staged with fierce concentration by director Matt Reeves, who cut his teeth on the sophomoric “Cloverfield” before showing real maturity with “Let Me In.” “Dawn” doesn’t have a major action scene until the second hour, but it goes by quickly anyway. Reeves adroitly toggles between foreboding and optimism while potential conflicts and allegiances range in all configurations of apes and humans.

One instant there’s a disarming sign of better things when a creaky machine starts playing an old song or a baby ape scampers comfortably among the humans. But then there will be a battle scene that’s all hallucinatory lighting and the queasy, dire tones of Michael Giacchino’s unsettling score.

If the human characters are somewhat thin (each of them is practically stamped with a halo or a devil’s horns), the apes make up for it by being riveting. Caesar — noble, wise, thoughtful, tender — emerges as a blockbuster hero for the ages. If only the average superhero movie had so much humanity.