Dawn of the Planet of the Apes with intelligence and emotional resonance to match its stunning special effects, it expands on its predecessor with an exciting and ambitious burst of sci-fi achievement.Its so fresh that the running time of 2hr 10 min felt like half an hour ,its so engaging.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. There is a ape in every human and there is a human in every ape. This line describes the whole idea behind consistently engaging and imaginative sequel to the well respected Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Taking a jump of 10 years from the last movie, dawn is about the survival of the fittest among apes and humans.

Caesar, the amazing creation of combination of acting skills of Andy Serkis and new age motion capture technology is the heart of the story. He leads, and bleeds for the apes. Apes have become almost human. They have families, the conflicts, the trust issues with humans and the rules to govern their wild colony. These tiny details make Dawn a unique piece of cinema. All jungle scenes are done so well that they make real footage of National Geographic seem ordinary. All apes and humans characters make you root for them even the evil ones. Caesar's elder son's emotional journey is soothing and his younger's son's first encounter with humans is heart warming. At the same time, ape Koba's encounter with two humans guarding the weapons and his ever rising conflict with Caesar is chilling.

For nitpicking, apes riding horses seems somewhat hard to believe and 3D does not add any value in the story telling apart from the massive destruction scene in the climax. Running for more than 2 hours, dawn is a high voltage action and fiction drama that leaves you amazed.

I am going with fantastic 8 out of 10 for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It is the most sure footed blockbuster of Hollywood this year so far. Don't miss it!

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a film by Matt Reeves, is extremely high on emotional side. It is great to see the emotional connect between humans and the apes. This movie really explores what happened after ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’. If ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ was spectacular, this is super-spectacular. The presentation of the movie is so natural and simple that one gets to relate with almost all the characters. Everyone has the right to live on this earth, be it animals or humans, one cannot afford to become the threat for the other. The evolved apes are trying to live their own lives and humans are in the struggle to survive. Each character, whether humans or apes, has been so well crafted and detailed. We get to feel their loss, fear, insecurity, efforts for survival etc. It is great to see the sentient apes, talking, expressing emotions like humans. Apes are shown to be quite rational and forgiving in comparison to humans. In spite of them having experienced human cruelty and imprisonment, now they want peace and just want to be free in their own world away from humans. This movie tells the story of how the declining humans and the ascendant apes come to be at war. The movie begins from where the ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ finished. In the first film, humans gave the apes their intelligence with an experimental drug. Ten years later, humans have largely been wiped out by contagious and deadly side effects of the same experiment. A quick montage gives us an idea of all these happenings since Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It narrates the wake of a flu epidemic, followed by violence and chaos. As a result, Dr. Willman (James Franco) and other millions of people are dead. Human civilization has become almost extinct. The survivors have cobbled together a society in the ruins of San Francisco, with Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) as their leader. On the other side, apes are in the initial stage of their civilization. Initial frames of the movie shows Ceaser (Andy Serkis – what an amazing performance), leader of the apes, with his family and fellow apes in a forest. Outstanding scenes with the apes swinging off the trees, jumping off the walls. Blue eyes (Nick Thurston), teenage son of Caesar and Cornelia (Judy Greer) is shown to be impulsive and short-tempered. Koba (Tony Kebbell), Caesar’s adviser feels that Caesar is too affectionate towards humans. Koba has lot of angst towards human beings since he was a test subject for them all his life before he was freed by Caesar. Caesar’s second-in-command cum great friend is Rocket (Terry Notary), who is also the honorary uncle of Caesar’s children. Humans and apes are almost oblivious to the existence of each other, but the situation changes when humans come face to face with Blue Eyes and Ash (Doc Shaw), Rocket’s teenage son. Humans had come there hoping to tap an energy source, basically to gain access to a hydroelectric dam.Humans and apes clash. Who emerges as the dominant species?