Being Ape

I have just finished watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It is, by far, the best movie I have seen so far this year. It is very metaphorical in nature. And it touches on many issues ranging from what is power-lust to what constitutes inhumanity. All of this happens with one ape as a protagonist, Caesar. The strong-willed leader of the apes. He leads his kind with wit and vision. He talks and unlike most of today's leaders, he talks sense and nothing else.
What I was most impressed by in the film was the depiction of how hunger for power can lead one to unimaginable extents. Koba, the jealous ape in the pack, doesn't like Caesar's efforts to bond with the human-kind. When all his dissuasion fails to convince Caesar to turn back from helping humans. He decides to kill Caesar and take over the power among them himself. He makes the humans seem responsible for shooting Caesar. Caesar is proclaimed dead. But, as we see later, he isn't.
What is interesting to see is how, for his selfish agenda, Koba takes the whole of ape kind to war against the humans and endangers their lives. All this to ensure his hold over the power among his kind. He imprisons all of Caesar's loyalists so that no one can dissent his actions especially those that find his actions completely contradictory to what Caesar would have wanted.
The scenario is not very different from what we see in the larger world today. People imperilling others to settle their own points. Take for example what happened recently in Pakistan. Bilawal Bhutto saying that he would take all of Kashmir away from India and not give her a single inch of it. Being a war-mongerer just to score some political mileage. No care whatsoever to the tensions it creates on the borders. No care to what it does to the relations (whatever of it is left) of both the countries. He dares to say all this when his own country is already in the middle of a civil war like situation. And the government there is so fickle that it can be overthrown any moment.

There is a scene in the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes where Koba tells Caesar, 'Caesar not fight for apes. He fight for humans. Koba fights for apes.' In answer to this, Caesar tells him, 'Koba fight only for Koba.'
And the same is true for all those poisonous 'leaders' who serve their own purposes by making conflicts happen elsewhere. This is precisely what happened in the case of Jinnah who made it seem like he was fighting for Muslims whereas all he was fighting was for Jinnah.

There is an underlying criticism of the human race by the film which cannot be missed. In a scene from the film, Caesar says, 'I thought apes better than humans. But (after Koba), now I feel that apes too are like humans.'
Our humanity for each other has come under question when things, that should never have happened, have happened. Whether it is the easily avoidable wars like the Iraq war started by George Bush Jr or the religious riots we see here in India from time to time with the simple objective to divide and rule.
It is time that we put an end to such things or the day is not far when the earth would resemble the type of diplapidated land which we saw in the film. And humans would resemble their closest animal counterpart- the apes.