The Final 'Planet of the Apes' Trailer is Here

Planet of the Apes can be kind of hard to take seriously sometimes. I mean, it's a story about our simian ancestors gaining human intelligence and taking over the world. Even if it could probably happen, it can be hard to conceive of the animal you stare at when you go to the zoo coming toward you with a machine gun. And the Planet of the Apes movie poster was just laughably bad, sorry to say. However, if there's one thing that the final trailer for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does right, it's making you take the ape threat very, very seriously.

The trailer does a fantastic job of setting up the massive war between apes and humans while making both sides look very sympathetic. It's not just a war of aggression on the part of the apes; the humans are defending their territory fiercely, perhaps too fiercely considering how many times in the trailer it seems like apes and humans could have come to some sort of peace if Gary Oldman hadn't gotten trigger happy. At the same time, the trailer does a good job of highlighting the ridiculousness of the premise. At one point, an ape gets close to two humans with guns by smiling and pretending to do tricks before yanking their guns out of their hands and shooting them both in cold blood.

By the end of the trailer, it can be hard to decide if you should side with humanity or if you can understand a little too well how and why apes might feel like they need to take this planet back from us. And if you could care less about survival of the fittest-level power struggles, then there's so much firepower and so many explosions that you could almost be fooled into thinking this movie was directed by Michael Bay.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes comes out on July 11. Check out the trailer below.