Apes on Horses!
So I finally got around to seeing this. I know I'm late, I had plans to go right away but they fell through with some of my buddies and they were being annoying so I finally just up and went by myself (technically I took my little brother, but whatever)
So lets get into it!
Positives
First and foremost the CGI and motion capture in this film is absolutely wonderful and apparent. The apes movements and most especially facial expressions are a joy to watch and absorb.
And speaking of which, Caeser is an absolute BAMF. I seriously can't emphasize this enough - he is such a magnificent character on every level. From the visualization to his very personality. The layers and complexity he has is incredible. You see him as a leader, as a follower, as a fighter. You see him angry, you see him sad, you see him proud, you see him naive...everything. This guy is so amazing.
It was actually pretty refreshing and totally the right decision to transition the story from the humans to Caeser. Or at least put more focus on him. While I liked the first movie, I had issues with this specifically since I didn't find the characters all that interesting and sometimes it felt forced - and more like props to get the story going.
But nevertheless, Caeser is truly what makes this film shine. You will literally eat up every second he's on screen, regardless of what he's doing.
There are also some incredibly powerful individual scenes in this movie. Just 30-60 clips that are so powerful. The scene where they march up to the humans the first time, the Koba scars scene, the Koba tricking scene, Caeser's scene in the attic, and the ending scene.... There are seriously so many wonderful scenes in this movie.
The film's narrative is strong and how the war gets started is all handled very well. The movie never fells dragged on and sucks you in from beginning to end. The themes in this film of examining humanity are particularly strong as well.
Negatives
I think the one main flaw with this film is the characters, not named Caeser. To be frank, every character that wasn't him was pretty weak - especially the humans.
Now, I enjoyed that they focused on Caeser more than the humans, however its a duality story. We want to care about both sides because there is no right and wrong here, just shades of grey.
But I think they failed to give you any reason to care about the humans at all. They only even touched on it very briefly with the main family and basically ignored all other characters, including the humans in the city and Gary Oldmen's character. There's no reason to care about any of them, really. They were underdeveloped.
Carver especially is incredibly over the top, cliche character. Its extremely predictable and annoying at times.
Even Koba, probably the most well developed character after Caeser, fails a bit in my opinion. We understand that because of his former imprisonment he hates humans - and can even sympathize with him. The scene where he's pointing out his scars and saying "human work" was brilliant. However once we get deeper into the movie past his betrayal, he's just another cliche power hungry villain, killing his fellow apes. They sort of lost their way with him imo.
There are some other nitpicks I have, but I'm not in a nitpicky mood right now and every movie has them.
Overall
Caeser, the amazing scenes and the strong narrative overall make this a good movie. I think it could have be better had the supporting characters been developed more, but even so there's all ready a lot of material covered in this movie I understand it would have been difficult to include. Even so, it has some flaws in my opinion but they don't drag it down too much - Caeser is simply too much of a BAMF.
8/10. Highly recommend seeing it.