Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes New Trailers - 8 Things We Learned

4. Dark, Post-Apocalyptic Tone

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes looks far different than its predecessor, both tonally and cinematically. Things are much darker and more bleak this time around, thanks to a muted color palette and post-apocalyptic imagery. We see several shots of a San Francisco overrun with vegetation, the human factions living in bleak, broken buildings. The forests surrounding the city look to have gotten even bigger, and all of the shots within them look cold and damp. Even the home of the apes, buried within and built into the woods, looks like a harsh and hyper-natural environment. This is all in stark contrast to the contemporary and sheen world of the first film, only driving home the fact that the planet no longer belongs to us. As humans disappear from the world, the buildings and objects we leave behind begin to become artifacts of a bygone civilization. This is an effective, if not familiar, way to convey the gravity of the situation at hand, and a perfect way to visually convey how much the world has changed since the first film.