VOD Spotlight: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes traces the path of the apes’ evolution from the mostly mute — though intelligent — animals of Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the articulate, civilized beings that have become the Earth’s dominant species shown in the Planet of the Apes franchise.

Director Matt Reeves explains: “In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the apes said only a few words. With this film, we show the apes at the dawn of their society, learning to truly speak.”

Co-screenwriter Mark Bomback says that one of the script’s biggest challenges was how to depict the manner in which the apes communicate with each other and how much they articulate verbally. “In this film, we explore how much further the apes have advanced in their language skills. We struggled a lot with this because there’s a temptation to give the apes pages and pages of dialogue. But there was a huge plausibility issue we were contending with, which is it’s only been 10 years since the events of the previous film, and if Caesar is only able to say one sentence in that film, then how much speech would he really be capable of in this one?”

“The second question was, why would they actually need to speak,” Bomback continues. “Apes were perfectly able to communicate with each other through sign language, so why would they want to or need to talk like humans? By extension, at what point is sign language inadequate, emotionally, so that the apes would have to speak?”

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Adds Reeves: “The thing that was important to me was that the story, and its elements such as language, not jump too ahead far, in a certain way, from where things were in Rise of the Planet of the Apes; when Andy says ‘NO!’ in Rise, I think it’s so startling it blew me away.”

“This time there is an evolution in linguistic terms,” explains Andy Serkis, who plays Caesar. “We worked in great detail in terms of creating that level of sophistication versus ‘finding’ language. Caesar communicates through the sign language he was taught, which has become a unifying way of speaking with the other apes. At the same time, he’s verbalizing more.”

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is available starting Dec. 16 on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.

 

™ and © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Credit: WETA

1 Comment

  1. This movie makes a great gift for this holiday season, and it now costs $10. Other planet of the apes movies are down in price as well this week. This website has all the POA movies

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