DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

(Matt Reeves, 2014)

The real glory of this film lies in the way director Reeves tells his story. Good cinematic storytelling is becoming something of a rarity in blockbuster cinema. But he puts together a series of beautiful visuals that flow together to tell this story with economy, power and wit.
The film picks up ten years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes; the human race is almost extinct, civilization more or less vanished. Caesar (Andy Serkis), the super-intelligent chimp who led a group of apes into the woods near San Francisco at the climax of the first film, is now leader of a settlement in that forest. The apes communicate using sign language and some speech, live in tree houses and ride horses. They teach one another rules and hunt deer with spears. Caesar's allies from his escape are now his most trusted advisors- gentle Orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval), angry Koba (Toby Kebell) and loyal Rocket, alongside Caesar's son Blue Eyes. The apes have seen no humans for two years.
But they soon encounter a group of humans in their territory, there to repair a dam so power can be restored to their home, a tower in the city.
This group is led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke), and he, like Caesar, is intent on protecting his family, which includes a son (Cody Smit-McPhee) and new wife (Keri Russell, largely wasted). The initial encounter goes badly, setting the tone for all to come. While Koba - scarred by years of experiments in human labs - preaches that the apes should attack the humans, Dreyfuss (Gary Oldman), who set up the colony with Malcolm, counsels much the same to his group.
From that point in, what Reeves shapes is a slow-motion tragedy, as the minority hawks on each side drive their species into a bloody, destructive war that Malcolm and Caesar are powerless to stop, hard as they try, and much as their own friendship suggests there may be another way. The details are perfectly observed; the way Koba clowns as a stage chimpanzee to gain human trust, the way Maurice and Malcolm's son bond over a graphic novel (Charles Burns' Black Sun), the brief human euphoria at the return of power, Blue Eyes and his adolescent rebellion, even the way the city is already an overgrown mossy jungle.
Most of all though Reeves conjures up a sense of wonder and alien fear - the ape society is so well-evoked and detailed in the first act, that it is a little coup how strange and otherworldly it (and its denizens) becomes when the humans see it. These two sides fear one another, but they are curious too.
The inevitable violence is thrillingly shot, and as he did in Let Me In, Reeves indulges himself with an impressive single-take shot of Koba atop a tank progressing across the battleground. But it all works so well because here Reeves has established these characters - both ape and human - so convincingly, and made us care about them. The emotional connection we feel pays off in the climactic scenes, which are tragic and weighted with sorrow and regret.
The effects are - obviously - superb.

LET ME IN

(Matt Reeves, 2010)

It's really only when you encounter the work of a really natural visual storyteller that the amount of directors who have no real facility with the visual aspect of cinema becomes clear. So many directors are efficient, telling a story by putting the camera in a position which effectively captures the action. Then there are directors who strain themselves seeking a ceaseless stream of beautiful shots - artful composition follows dazzling palette follows ostentatious camera movement...
And then you have someone like Matt Reeves, who with Let Me In, a remake of the superb Swedish horror Let The Right One In from 2008, suggests that he knows exactly how to tell a story with words and moving pictures.
Every shot in this film is beautiful in one way or other. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer, has been doing some stunning work lately, but Let Me In might remain his loveliest performance behind the camera. Reeves combines that beauty with a pleasing economy - he chooses the best shots to move his story forward, and each shot follows the last with clockwork precision. Thats not to say the storytelling here is predictable. On the contrary, its often surprising, even thrilling in its arty emphasis upon atmospherics and mood. All this, and there is even a little visual poetry in the films portrayal of wintry Los Alamos, mostly by night, the snow reflecting various sickly shades of yellow and green.
The plot simplifies and pares down what Alfredson's original took from the source novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and in doing so, for me, fractionally surpasses that film. This may lack the genuine sense of otherness in the Swedish version, but it is more melancholy, more morally complex and more frightening.
The story is the same: in Los Alamos in the early 1980s, a lonely, horrendously bullied boy,  Owen (Kody Smit-McPhee) meets his strange new neighbour, Abby (Chloë Moretz), who has recently arrived with an older man who appears to be her father (Richard Jenkins). At the same time a local Police Detective (Elias Koteas) is investigating the murder of a local youth, found hanging from a tree, all his blood drained from his body. As Owen and Abby grow closer, he learns that she doesn't feel the cold, never comes out in the daytime, and doesn't eat any normal food...
Using vampirism as a metaphor for the pains of adolescence isn't a new idea, but it is particularly well done here. The bullying in this film is portrayed with real authenticity - it is awful, terrifying and senseless - and that, together with Smit-McPhee's understated, numbed performance, gives the seemingly minor tribulations of Owen's home and school life great power. The tension in each of the scenes where he is confronted by the bullies is brutal, giving the more outlandish scenes of the supernatural a very different, eerie charge. Reeves pulls off a couple of stunning set pieces: the scene where everything goes wrong for Jenkins' character on a trip to harvest some blood is magnificent; thrillingly executed and extremely clever in conception, and the swimming pool climax is similarly masterly.
The '80s are subtly evoked, the performances are all quietly excellent and the tension established in the prologue never really lessens, right up to the epilogue, which is beautifully ambiguous and tinged with melancholy.