I loved the “Planet of the Apes” movies and TV series when I was a kid. We’ve recently seen the first two of the current series, starting with “Rise” in 2011, and I think those are pretty great too.
We watched “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” last night. The motion-capture/CGI performances of the ape characters were brilliant. Thematically, the movie was of a piece with the 1968-70s series, at least as I remember it, about the futility and misery of violence, war and hate, and of seeing other races as animals—“vermin”—and how violence and hate becomes a tide that sweeps good people away.
The movie came out in 2014, and some of the parallels to the ten years of events that were to follow—the last 10 years we’ve lived through—are eerie. A plague. The rise of a megalomanial leader who’s driven by self-love and hate for others.