Many of us here on the internet openly lament Hollywood’s fixation on sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots as their creative crutches of choice. Implicit in our grumbles is the broad assumption that all of those recycling methods are inherently bad by definition. We’re sometimes quick to forget within the space of 140 characters, for the sake of the snarky punchline, that such vehicles don’t have to be all bad. Their success rate is disappointing, but it’s far from 0%.

Last weekend, six of the top ten films on the box office chart were sequels. One was a sequel and a sort-of relaunch; one a sequel to a spinoff; one a sequel to a remake; and two were just plain sequels. And then there was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a loose do-over of 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes with the additions of one large MacGuffin and some expensive set pieces, any one of which probably cost five times Battle‘s miserly budget. Also, they smartly ditched the humans’ sci-fi B-movie costumes.

So Dawn is a sequel to a reboot and it’s a remake. Its pedigree is an anti-art hat trick. Somehow it’s also one of the best films of the summer.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Ten years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, most of humanity and James Franco have been wiped out by a virus spawned from the same laboratory responsible for the ape-smartening drug. While humans live in scattered factions, the original ape escapees and their descendants remain clustered in the forests near San Francisco. Leadership still belongs to Caesar (Andy Serkis, more spellbinding than ever), who’s now a husband and father of two. Sign language is a given, written language is an option taught to the willing, and limited vocal power belongs to a select few main characters. All is peaceful despite the occasional grumpy ape, and his former cellmate Koba (an intimidating Toby Kebbell) is the grumpiest of them all.

Then they run into humans, and everything’s ruined. The humans are desperate to bring back electricity and have discovered an abandoned hydroelectric dam that could save the day. Too bad it’s on ape turf. Delicate negotiations commence. Hysteria ensues. Next thing you know, there’s a war near the city for the dam with the power in the forest on the planet of the apes.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: A frazzled Gary Oldman is the leader of the struggling human community, but the true hero among them is Jason Clarke, best known as the kindly torturer from Zero Dark Thirty. Coupled with him is TV’s Keri Russell, whose jobs are doctoring and being concerned. His son is Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road and Let Me In, now twice as tall. And Fringe‘s Kirk Acevedo is the hot-headed, intolerant, illogical human who ruins the most everything.

Serkis and Kebbell lead among the apes, both outstanding in the field of mo-cap excellence. Serkis wins, but not by a ten-second knockout. The only other noticeable name I caught on their side is Judy Greer (her small role in The Descendants tore my heart to pieces) as Caesar’s mate Cornelia, whose jobs are being doctored and being concerned.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? In a subtle shift from the Rise paradigm, Dawn doesn’t stick to a paradigm where all animals are saints and all humankind is Satan incarnate. Sure, Oldman doesn’t hesitate to view the apes as The Enemy, but he’s doing the best he can to lead his people’s survival based on limited information. His view has a certain amount of “They’re just monkeys! Kill them all!” but more often than not, it’s a simple choice of prioritizing Us over Them. But Oldman had been open to the compromise option at first, thanks to Clarke’s delicate negotiations. If the territory had been held by thugs instead of apes, I wager he might’ve been more immediately hostile.

Things are much worse on Team Ape, where Koba makes no secret that he’s straight-up speciesist. He has reasons for his bitterness — in one of the best scenes, he explains his uncompromising position to Caesar by pointing at the grotesque scars he bears from his lab-testing days and bellowing, “HUMAN WORK!” Once Koba lopes off to go plot and scheme, Caesar grieves, for he knows that humanity’s worst qualities have blinded Koba to humanity’s best.

As the schism widens, the central conflict shifts from ape-vs.-human to ape-vs.-ape, and Caesar realizes Koba isn’t the only one who’s been wearing blinders. Ultimately his side has been just as guilty of unfair, uninformed generalizations as the other. I never expected a summer action blockbuster to bear a thematic resemblance to In the Heat of the Night, but here we are.

The dire consequences of so many tragic developments weigh crushingly upon Caesar. He’s no stoic, one-note Optimus Prime who responds to challenges with louder shouting and emptier speeches until the credits roll. The look in his eyes transforms from the opening scenes to the open-ended finale, and we’re invited to examine up close the toll that leadership takes on us in the worst of times.

If all the deep thoughts worry you, fear not: there are also EXPLOSIONS. Ape fights, gunfights, a showdown inside a large tower, and the unforgettable image of a screaming ape riding horseback through a raging fire while spraying bullets everywhere with rifles clutched in both paws. If anyone in their Marketing department had actually watched the movie, stores would be moving large quantities of Koba posters and T-shirts right now.

Nitpicking? Early scenes show us limited populations of humans and simians alike, feel a bit more authentically post-apocalyptic. Past the film’s halfway point, the numbers on both sides start swelling in endless streams as if they all radioed for backup from other states.

Mentioned here for those who notice these things: the women’s roles are nominal. Keri Russell has useful job skills, but neither she nor Cornelia garner any Great Moments to call their own.

So did I like it or not? As I said: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is one of the best films of the summer. The effects team successfully augments Andy Serkis’s already varied, nuanced, leading-man performance into an indelible portrait of a leader with a wounded soul. Toby Kebbell hopefully strides closer to becoming a household name. As the best among the put-upon humans, Jason Clarke does what he can to represent on behalf of people who aren’t terrible and are willing to reason together with others.

Best of all, it’s not just two hours of apes and humans fighting and fighting and fighting. Their dichotomous debates and communication breakdowns are a stinging indictment of much of what passes for civilization in today’s broken, pre-apocalyptic world, where too many of us view everything through glasses that are rose-colored on our side and fractured on the Other’s.

Dawn has all this and great effects, too. Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) skillfully balances the scales between emotional turmoil and ape-attack thrill-ride, tosses in a long tracking shot or two for value-added cinema fun, doesn’t lose the human cast entirely, and asks us to consider just how far away we really are from this shattered future where everything’s bipartisan and nothing’s for peace.

How about those end credits? No, there’s not exactly a scene after the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes end credits, though the last several seconds are accompanied by the sounds of apes and background noises that imply something is happening out of sight.

Most gratifying part of the end credits: despite layers of CG and an expectation of continual snubbing by the Academy, Andy Serkis is granted top billing anyway. Kebbell is down in fifth place, right after the leading lady.

Follow-up viewing recommendation: if you’re interested in more Toby Kebbell, you don’t have to settle for War Horse or (ugh) Wrath of the Titans. He costarred in a recent Masterpiece Mystery miniseries called The Escape Artist as a conniving murderer who has to match wits with David Tennant’s antihero barrister. My wife and I watched it because of the Tenth Doctor, but Kebbell’s fearsome suspect has the same overconfidence and malicious gaze as his Koba. Several plot twists waved to us as saw them approaching from afar, but the performances by both Kebbell and Tennant are worth checking out.