Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Essential, and it is the most carefully balanced film in either continuity. Matt Reeves took over and built a tragedy with a precise structure: two communities, each led by somebody who genuinely wants peace, each containing somebody who does not, and a sequence of small misjudgements that none of the four can walk back.

The construction is the point. Nobody in this film is a villain in the ordinary sense. Koba's hatred is entirely earned, because the film shows you what was done to him in a laboratory and never asks you to forget it; the human faction's fear is reasonable; and the war begins because a frightened man brings a gun to a negotiation. The tragedy is that the two leaders remain in agreement throughout and it changes nothing.

It is also the film where the technology disappeared into the performance. Long stretches are in sign language with subtitles, in rain, in low light, with no humans on screen at all, and the production shot much of it on location rather than on a stage. The shot of a tank turret rotating with Koba on top of it is the one people remember, and the quiet scenes in the ape settlement are the ones that matter.

Watch Rise first. Not because the plot requires much of it, but because this film's weight depends entirely on knowing what Caesar was raised to believe about human beings.