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Ahead of the release of Matt Reeves’ sequel to the phenomenally successful Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Twentieth Century Fox laid on a preview event to showcase a portion of the movie, followed by a very special Q&A session with a few familiar faces as well as some very specific experts. Greg D Smith reports.

The second best part of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was that it was unafraid of being smart. In an era of big, special effects-heavy comic book movies laden with exposition in dialogue and scenes, it was refreshing to have a blockbuster that treated the audience as smart adults, and didn’t ever attempt to spoon feed them or lead them along by the hand. The best part (in the opinion of this reviewer) was that it focused squarely on the point of view of the apes. Avoiding (one of) the pitfalls of the Tim Burton iteration, director Reeves focused on what an actual society made up of intelligent apes would look like, rather than just making them humans with funny costumes. The nuances of how they communicated, how their civilisation was growing and developing around leader Caesar, were fascinating and of far more interest than anything that the humans were up to, and the movie recognised and embraced this fact.

Happily then, I can report that this preview suggested that this focus remains in War for the Planet of the Apes, the third (and, we were told, not the last) in the Apes franchise. The story of Caesar’s conflict with Woody Harrelson’s ‘The Colonel’ promises action, adventure and an even deeper exploration of what that civilisation built from super-intelligent apes might look like. It also takes the opportunity to reflect ever more on how that society mirrors as well as diverges from our own. As Reeves says, it’s a war movie, and war movies are about looking at the dark side of human nature, about examining how the normal mores and ethics of humanity are discarded, at what point and to what extent. In looking at the Apes as they gear up for a conflict based partly on survival and partly on vengeance, we are looking at a dark mirror for our own foibles and pitfalls as a species. It’s unflinching, and genuinely emotional. There were parts in the just over an hour of the movie that we were shown which carried genuine emotion – not the manufactured schmaltz of some releases this year, nor the novelty of others, but genuine weight and pathos, linked to characters which are no less relatable and loved for not being human.

If that sounds like everything about the movie is dark and depressing, allow me to reassure you that the movie also carries moments of lightness and even comedy. Steve Zahn’s Bad Ape character is going to be one of those standouts of the year in terms of what he brings to the mix. Again, this isn’t the heavy-handed pratfall type of comic relief. Bad Ape is a genuinely tragic character, and much of the comedy comes from his desperate need – referenced by Zahn himself in the Q&A – to have company and belong to a group. There were several moments in the screening where the whole audience was laughing at Bad Ape, but it was a laughter of genuine affection, tinged with sadness. Serkis’s Caesar may be the face and driving force of the franchise, but Zahn’s Bad Ape may well prove to be its heart.

Our hour done (to groans from an audience who genuinely wanted to see the rest), we were treated to a very special panel of guests doing a Q&A session. Advertised had been ‘Primatology Experts and Filmmakers’ and what we got didn’t disappoint. For the former, we had Lauren Brent and Zanna Clay, the former a Primate Behavioural Ecologist and the latter an Assistant Professor in Psychology, studying Great Apes as part of investigation into the evolution of human behaviour. Alongside them were Matt Reeves, Steve Zahn and Andy Serkis himself.

The session lasted roughly forty five minutes, and highlights included the genuine affection for the movies from both experts (Brent claiming she knew the original Apes movies largely from Simpsons references to them), Zahn’s slight panic as to how he might quickly catch up to a cast two movies into their ‘ape behaviour’ (he watched a lot of captive ape footage, came at the role from an emotional rather than an intellectual level and focused on just getting through each day) and Serkis’s deep ruminations on the nature of Caesar’s character and the almost unique opportunity the role has presented to play a character essentially from ‘birth’ right through to old age. Serkis claims that his role, especially in this movie, has been less focused on studying apes and ape behaviour simply because the evolution of Caesar is more towards human as time goes on. In this third instalment, Caesar is wrestling with very human impulses (rage, revenge, grief) and as Serkis and Reeves both point out, Caesar stands out as being the only one of the Apes who speaks vocally. Even among his own kind, Caesar stands as an outsider, and it will be fascinating to see where this movie takes that arc, and what the conclusion might be. Brent and Clay remind us that it’s less an anatomical issue preventing apes from speaking, more a lack of fine control of that anatomy – in a few thousand years, maybe apes will rule the world after all.

By the conclusion, one thing was clear – here is a movie made by people who genuinely care. Reeves’ revelation that the studio’s original timetable would have had the movie release last summer, the admiration of the experts for the realism of the ape interactions and social grouping, and Zahn’s assertion that he had played the character of Bad Ape from a very emotional place all contribute to an impression that the genuine intelligence and emotion of Dawn was no accident, and that War will prove to be a case of lightning striking the same place again. Reeves also revealed that this is not the final instalment of the franchise, and one can only hope that the studio continues to place the faith and trust in the creators and artists to do their job, and keep making what is undoubtedly some of the finest and most emotionally mature sci-fi in cinemas today.