Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes: 7 Awesome Easter Eggs And References You Probably Missed

4. 2001: An Ape Odyssey

When you're making a Planet Of The Apes movie, the typical 1968 film featuring groundbreaking ape make-up you tend to call back to is Franklin J. Schaffner's original. Not for Reeves, who took many of his cues from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well, the opening sequence at least; let's save the psychopathic computer for the seventh sequel. For a film so reluctant to give a shout out to the series the film is actually in, so much of Dawn's iconography and themes seem directly lifted from 2001's Dawn Of Man segment. Obviously there's the incredibly overt reference in the title, but things run deeper than that. The image on the poster of Caesar brandishing a machine gun evokes Kubrick's monkeys and their bone tools, while the dialogue-less opening twenty minutes certainly owes more to Odyssey than Wall-E (which some critics have bizarrely raised). Even the theme of the evolution of a whole species being bigger than the individuals involved is something that runs through Kubrick's film. In fact, this is exactly how Reeves pitched the movie. Fox were already steaming ahead with their idea for a sequel to Rise, but the director had his own idea, instead choosing to riff on one of his favourite films.