Okay, I will admit that I don’t really have a theme for this month’s Speculative Fiction Saturday, so I’m just going to review some films that I have seen in 2014. I’ll go ahead and start with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Allow me to explain the Planet of the Apes for those who are not familiar with it. It was a movies series that began in the 1970’s with a Charlton Heston, who plays an astronaut who crash-lands on a world where humans are held in captivity by intelligent apes. It was based on a book, and the movie was a moderate hit that spawn a few sequels. There was an attempt to reboot the franchise from Tim Burton in 2000, but the film is considered a terrible offering today. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a second attempt at a reboot, was considered a great hit, enough to merit this movie.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes begins shortly after where the reboot ended. In that film, an ape named Caesar had developed sapient intelligence, and shunned all humans with his new gang of apes. I think there is a some sort of simian flu that kills a lot of humans, which means that civilization just kind of dies.

This is one of the things that I tend not to like about certain speculative fiction films: civilization falls way too easily. Seriously, it seems like zombies would be a major conflict, but it shouldn’t crumble your society if you handle it right. In the case of this new Apes movie, humans live in a decrepit San Francisco, while the apes live out in the forest. There is sort of a cold war going on between the humans and the apes, and it really explained what happened because the last film didn’t really set this up well. Again, I just don’t think humans and apes should have had such a schism.

Anyway, the humans decide to investigate the apes’ headquarters, but they are caught. The apes mobilize and tell the humans to stay away from their lands. A small group of humans don’t listen and decide to show up at the apes’ doorstep and give them an offer. Apparently, there is a dam that the apes have been hogging, and if the humans can get the hydroelectric power back, it will help build better relations.

This is what I liked about this film. All of the past Planet of the Apes focused on the conflict between humans and simians, but there is never an suggestion that they can actually live together in peace. It’s an angle that hasn’t been tried, but it shows that they are trying something different, and different is good for this storyline.

Okay, I probably should have said this before, but I hate monkeys. I think that films like Ed or Dunstan Checks In are proof that monkeys are a cheap laugh, and that whole evolution tie-in really ticks me off. However, the monkeys in the film look very realistic, and it is proof that special effects can be used to tell a story. Not only that, the apes convey so much in their faces that dialogue is barely needed.

I am thinking that the theme of this film is how peace is a fragile thing, and it comes apart very easily. One of the things that I don’t think the Planet of the Apes films could do is successfully show how we go from civilization as we know it to the point where Apes are the masters. I’m not certain what the long-term plan is for these films are, but it could be interesting.