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

3. Alexander Is Reading Black Hole

Whenever a book pops up in a blockbuster film you know the director's trying to make some intellectual comparison with their own work. And more often than not it comes out more pretentious than profound. But when Matt Reeves pulls it in Dawn it isn't the frankly perplexing Moby Dick confusion from After Earth, but something much more subtle. Kodi Smit-McPhee's Alexander is reading Black Hole, Charles Burn's comic series about a group of teenagers who become socially outcast after a horrific STD leaves them physically deformed. A thinly veiled metaphor for adolescence, on a surface level the book and film share many elements, chief among them a deadly and uncontrollable virus and the manner in which isolated communities function. But what it really does in the context of the film is serve to make the scene when Alexander and Maurice have a read together that little more poignant. Let's just not question why someone who's in an isolated situation would choose something so similar as light reading (although if you haven't you should definitely check it out).