Last week I rewatched Rise of the Planet of the Apes, hoping to further invigorate my excitement over Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It worked, and not only am I excited to see this sequel, I’m very curious to see how they handle the apes speaking.
In the first film it was largely grunts outside of Caesar’s (Andy Serkis) whispered words at the end and, of course, the “NO!” moment. But will Dawn feature apes speaking in full sentences?
My guess is their speech will be a mix of competent, broken and none at all with Caesar (and maybe Koba played by Toby Kebbell) probably being the only one truly speaking with any measure of firm grasp of the language. Then again, not only will Caesar have a wife, Cornelia (Judy Greer), in this one, but he also has an infant son and a teenage son. Serkis tells USA Today, “This film centers around the notion of family — the survival of the family and what lengths you would go to to protect them when life is extremely hard and tough.”
The film features a small band of surviving humans, led by Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke and Keri Russell, who form a new colony in deserted San Francisco. and director Matt Reeves says of the story, “We all know it doesn’t become Planet of Humans and Apes, it becomes Planet of the Apes. But this is that one moment of time where there is hope for humans.”
So it sounds like Dawn is being looked at as the middle film in a trilogy with the third being Planet of the Apes, which I expect will take us to the year 3954, the year the astronauts from the spaceship we saw launch in Rise will find its way back to Earth. Though, I expect they won’t take it that far into the future.
MORE: Timeline and Exploration of the Original ‘Planet of the Apes’ Franchise
All that said, just below are nine more new pictures from the film, which hits theaters on July 11.
