When I first started writing my blog, I kicked it off proper ten years ago with a big double review of two massive Summer blockbusters that I had recently seen. Those films were, as you may have guessed, Guardians of the Galaxy and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. By chance, both these films turned out to be formative for their own reasons and ten years on, both still provide a lot to chew on. So, let’s review them again! I’m a much better reviewer today than I was ten years ago (you would hope, with a film degree under my belt) and like I say, these are films that do still deserve to be discussed for their place in Hollywood’s output. The question is, how have they aged? Both were 9/10 films for me a decade ago, can the talking raccoon movie and the talking monkey movie live up to the heights a 14 year old Henry held them up to? What a bold and provocative setup, I really do have a Film and English degree.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Guardians of the Galaxy is the 10th film released as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). For context, the recently released Deadpool and Wolverine is the 34th, which doesn’t even include the 12 seasons of TV that have also been forced onto us. In case it wasn’t obvious, the MCU was in a very different place in 2014, with only one Avengers movie having been released and the sense of a grand ending still very far off. Still, the films were beginning to knit together, characters crossing over between films and each plot becoming more important to understanding the next. If Guardians of the Galaxy felt refreshing in 2014 for being disconnected from the narrative of the MCU, you have no idea how good it feels in 2024.
Ironically, the plot itself is weak, appropriating the feel of a space opera without quite committing to the scale that these stories go for. A bunch of misfits are brought together in an unlikely string of events, team up and stop a baddie from using a stone (what we now understand as an Infinity Stone) to blow up a planet. Considering that the past ten years have given us a faithful and bombastic Dune adaptation, it’s hard not to feel cheated by the world building that is in service of nothing in particular. However, the lack of an impactful plot doesn’t feel like a sticking point against GOTG, as its strengths are plentiful in other areas. In particular, the core characters are very well realised. Part of this feeling is certainly the context of these characters having a multi-film arc across the GOTG trilogy and last two Avengers films, but there’s a lot of work done here. My fondness for Rocket, Drax and Yondu is certainly based on the later films, but Groot’s characterisation is remarkably and instantly brilliant. He gets a handful of moments of quiet compassion, in which he very literally gives part of himself to others, and all of these scenes were profoundly beautiful to me. That’s such a silly thing to say about the MCU now but James Gunn and his team of writers really knew what they were doing.
Peter Quill is also shockingly well characterised for a superhero lead. We immediately understand the trauma he holds from never facing the death of his mother and that pathos gives a purpose to the now iconic “Awesome Mix.” The album has been such a phenomenal success in its own right, topping album charts, being the must own CD for every teenage boy of the time (including me) and also helping introduce a lot of classic rock to a new generation. What this success obfuscates though is the importance of the mixtape to Peter. These songs have been the only thing linking him to his home planet for over twenty years and he must have listened to them thousands of times. The music also helps establish Peter as a loser, in a way that is hugely endearing. Compare, to take a random example not chosen with any cruelty, to Deadpool and Wolverine. Both films feature a dance scene over the opening credits but take very different routes to create a very different effect. For Deadpool, our main character is seen doing a very well choreographed dance to “Bye, Bye, Bye”, a song that I don’t think it’s unfair to say is bad (and was also much better utilised in the opening credits of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket.) In GOTG however, Quill dances badly to “Come and Get Your Love”, a fantastic song that was not much remembered since the time of release. Where the Deadpool scene is played entirely for comedy (a comedy which, not to keep kicking the dead horse, does not land), GOTG uses a scene that is comedic to also tell us the importance of music to Quill and express the dorky side that exists alongside his adventurous persona. For my money, it’s the best character introduction in the entire franchise and I doubt we’ll get something as simple and efficient again.
To wrap up the chat about the cast, this is a very well cast film which managed to make stars of its smaller names and use well the bigger names. We love to hate Chris Pratt these days but coming fresh off Parks and Recreations, Peter Quill was the perfect role for him and the one he would deserve to be remembered for if he didn’t love cashing cheques so much. Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel give genuinely impactful performances with just their voices, Cooper himself bettering everything he did before and since, with the exception of A Star is Born. It is also clear on a rewatch that Dave Bautista was immediately the real deal. He gives a gravitas to Drax that is apparent the second he appears on screen, yet allows his immaculate comedy skills to slowly flourish throughout the film. In any just world, he should be the biggest actor in the world, though I do love his dedication to strange passion projects in recent years. One other thing that feels strange in context is the appearances of Glenn Close and John C. Reilly, actors who never appear again in the MCU but pop in here to have a quick bit of fun. They should be better than this but their willingness and sense of game is warming. Good for them for taking the money and running.
It’s not all positive. GOTG has a lot of the issues that have since come to characterise much of the MCU and its imitators. As I said, the plot is a bore and lead villain Ronan the Accuser is a fantastically dull villain. None of that is Lee Pace’s fault, he is simply given nothing to work with beyond a character who wants to blow up planets. As such, when the third act gets plot heavy it chugs along and loses the great pacing of the past two acts, which is a shame. Also a shame are the lessons Hollywood took from the success of GOTG. One immediate thing Hollywood settled on was turning their ensemble films into jukebox musicals of sorts, with the most notable offender being the 2016 nightmare Suicide Squad, a fetid pool full of ideas that blended like oil and water. Ironically, it would be Gunn himself who would come in and redeem that franchise with The Suicide Squad, a definitive improvement that showed what a difference clarity of vision makes. Even as recent as this month, Borderlands proved that studios want GOTG but aren’t interested in an actual cinematic vision if the noise is loud enough.
I think the other big lesson that studios took from GOTG was that audiences wanted cool wacky adventures in space. Don’t get me wrong, I am broadly in favour of that but there has to be some kind of heart. Recent MCU disasters like Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania prove that simply setting a bunch of nonsense somewhere new doesn’t make a film feel new. Audiences are smarter than they seem, but treating them like idiots makes them feel like idiots. It makes them like Deadpool and Wolverine. The irony of this big speech about lesson learning is that one person did learn from GOTG: James Gunn. He wrapped up the gang’s adventures last year with a third feature and gave the Guardians their best outing yet. Whether he brings that magic to the new DC Universe is yet to be seen, but if nothing else he left Marvel on a high note that they seem determined to squander.
In a twist that seems predictable to any who understands the passage of time, Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t enchant me the way that it did when I was 14, yet it is still an easy high watermark for the MCU. We didn’t know how good we had it, but we also didn’t know how good Gunn specifically would treat us throughout the trilogy. Considering the mental, financial and emotional damage caused by the MCU and other attempted rivals, it is frankly shocking that I can still find it in me to love this film, yet I do. Despite being such a commercial product, it has at its core a beating heart and no amount of capitalist nonsense can cover that, not then, not now, not ever.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was my first Planet of the Apes film. I saw it in a double bill with GOTG because a friend who I had also seen it with was going along to Dawn. I had no expectations, walked in with open arms and now I am the biggest Planet of the Apes fan you know. As I now appreciate, Dawn follows on ten years after Rise, in which the Simian Flu has wiped out most of the human population of Earth and Caesar is leading a tribe of apes who live just outside what used to be San Francisco. One day they encounter a group of humans, who broadly seek no violence but just want to reactivate the dam so they can get electricity back. Both sides agree to let the dam be worked on, but there is dissent within both groups. For the humans, Carver is actively hostile towards the apes and blames the Simian Flu on them, despite the name arising from experiments performed on the apes. For the apes, Koba is rightly angry at the humans for testing on him before the outbreak, but wishes to escalate things and kill the remaining humans who could harm the apes again, whatever the cost. It creates a very strong divide in each camp between those who seek an alliance and those who wish to destroy their rivals and it is a powerful momentum that propels the film.
It sounds silly if you’re not in the know on your Apes lore but the core narrative of this film is one that is deeply political. The entire franchise has always been political, focussing on how power changes hands and what those new hands do with the power they have. In the case of Dawn, the focus is on how the paranoia and selfish desire of a handful of individuals corrupts the greater whole. If you’re familiar with a little show called The News, you might have spotted this recently. Hate figures like Nigel Farage, Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson create an enemy for people to fear, rile those around them into a violent fury and then plead dumb when this typhoon of bigotry becomes a deadly weapon. Like with all films that are “more relevant now than ever though”, it is less predictive of the future than it is reflective of the past. Humans have always been malleable at the hands of charismatic villains, in this world apes simply are too. Another unintended resonance is the Simian Flu angle of it. In the vein of hatred there is the bigotry aimed at those the flu is named after, like how COVID-19 was euphemistically called the Chinese Virus by Trump, again not foresight but a reflection of history and events like the Spanish flu. The Flu is also compelling though because of having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. Our virus wasn’t as deadly as this cinematic version so we recovered, but the lingering memory of former bustling spaces becoming liminal is still strong. I’m not going to claim Dawn is unique in this, The Last of Us pulled off a similarly affecting gambit the year before, but it is nevertheless affecting.
Our assembled cast is one that initially appears low-key, but all do roundly wonderful work. The humans are broadly expendable but solid. Jason Clarke is good enough to earn good will that has sustained him until now, Kodi Smit-McPhee gets to lean into his usual quiet loner thing and would I be being too much of a contrarian if I said Gary Oldman is better here than he was in his Oscar winning performance in Darkest Hour? He is wonderful, a quiet figure whose paranoia seeps into the film slowly, yet who is clearly still wracked by guilt. All the humans are in fact, it stood out to me this time, all our characters are plagued with survivors guilt over being the only one of their family to survive. It makes the humans weak and vulnerable in a way that still allows us to root for them against pre-established and broadly heroic characters.
These apes though… Man oh man are they fantastic. Andy Serkis really does bring to life Caesar with ease and his performance makes a difference, especially when compared to the unremarkable lead at the heart of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He gives all his films a grounding and this central film in the trilogy is where he is tested most deeply. Deeply underrated though is Toby Kebbell as Koba. Just after Dawn, Kebbell would have a legendarily bad run, starring in Fantastic Four (2015), Ben-Hur (2016) and the over-hated Warcraft, films for which he became a punching bag. He’s done great work since though, in A Monster Calls and Kong: Skull Island, so is clearly a talented actor stuck in some rubbish films. He is phenomenal here. Koba flits between two modes, either pathetic and weaselly or violent and demanding. In some scenes, he flips between the two in an instant, terrifying humans who witness him. He is a better villain than almost anyone the MCU presented before or since and Kebbell is a huge part of it. Also worthy of a shout is Karin Konoval who plays Maurice. In a weird parallel to Groot, Maurice is a gentle character whose power is in his small moments, like when he reads Alexander’s book. Every single time he appears on screen, whatever is happening gets 10% better without fail. Once again, great job Karin Konoval, we all love Maurice.
None of this talk about great apes would be possible though without the special effects surrounding them. Ten years ago, it was pretty much the selling point of these films and while photo-realistic special effects come as standard these days, Dawn still impresses. The worst you can say is that it looks like a video game but when you consider the outlandish level that video games are now capable of, it starts to sound closer to a compliment than it ever has. Crucially, the CGI never bursts believability. In every single scene, I believed that these fully computer generated characters were real. Even today, that is not an easy bar to clear and Dawn does so effortlessly. Accompanied by music that knows when to stick close to Jerry Goldsmith’s timeless feel and when to veer into Zimmer-esque action, as well as cinematography that is drop dead gorgeous at all times, few films since have felt as good as Dawn. Fewer still, if you rule out Matt Reeves’ other films.
The reason I keep coming back to Dawn though, both to watch and to discuss, is how versatile a film it is. It has the political layer I was talking about, creating interesting characters on which we can see a sociological struggle play out, working on interesting levels. The whole modern series, in fact, has been very smart on even very little things, like the evolving meaning of what was Caesar’s bedroom window, into a sign for hope and a sign that can be hijacked. That is a fantastic thing for the film to have. However, it is also an absolutely banging action film. Do I need to do more to sell you on the action other than saying “there is an ape on horseback dual wielding assault rifles?” I hope I don’t, otherwise I have failed to curate my readership base properly. The point is, the action is amazing and contains shocking weight for characters who only exist digitally. Having now seen what Reeves can do with The Batman, no one doubts his action credentials, but for the dedicated, Dawn showed early what impressively awesome action he can create with a camera, a deep CGI budget and a dream. That siege on the human camp, in particular, is a display of sheer screen shaking bombast that requires cinematic viewing and must now be turned down so the volume of ape violence doesn’t spook the neighbours.
The magic of these modern Planet of the Apes movies is their versatility. Where the old ones were political parables that often thrilled, Dawn signalled a shift into action and parable existing hand in hand, where one cannot exist without the other in a beautiful symbiotic harmony that somehow still allows room for warmth. Honestly, where Guardians wasn’t quite as wonderful as I remembered, Dawn was even more so. It is a true example of spectacle that has something to say and a film that feels out of place in Hollywood even ten years later. We were and are blessed to live in a world where Dawn of the Planet of the Apes exists.
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