CAESAR

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (NECA)

It’s not often that I review a figure from a film I haven’t seen. I think the last time I did that was with The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Minimates set, and those were Minimates, so I had that excuse going for me. Sometimes I’ll buy figures from a movie I’m looking forward to prior to seeing it. It’s not often I buy a figure from an upcoming movie I’m not even certain I’ll see in the theatre. But, that’s the case with today’s figure, Caesar, the lead character from this month’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I’ve seen the previous film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and I thought it was pretty good, but I’ve yet to really make up my mind on the sequel. It looks like it may have potential, so I might see about checking it out. Anyway, NECA picked up the rights to the film, and they’re doing a line of figures that just started hitting. So, let’s see how Caesar turned out!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Caesar is part of the first series of NECA’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes line. He stands about 6 ½ inches tall and features 24 points of articulation. Caesar is based on his look from Dawn, which is slightly different from his look in Rise, mostly in build and the presence of the tribal paint the apes are sporting this time around. Caesar sports an all new sculpt, and a very good one at that! Near as I can tell from looking at trailers and the like for the movie, Caesar’s sculpt is a pretty dead on realization of the CGI model used in the movie. The figure is covered from head to toe in hair detailing, which is all impressively handled, but I think the best part of this figure is his face, which features an amazing amount of texture and detail, and just seems full of character. It’s not all perfect; some of the hair points in odd directions, and there’s a bald patch on his torso that looks a bit off. However, the sculpt as a whole is definitely most impressive. The paint work is on par with the sculpt, doing an amazing job accenting the already great sculpt with some pretty great texture work. They’ve also included the tribal paint, which looks appropriately uneven and worn. Once again, the bald spot on his chest stands out as one of the few bad marks, being just a slop of flat brown paint amongst an otherwise heavily detailed figure.  Caesar includes a spear, which can be separated into two pieces, and a spare set of gripping hands to hold the spear. The spear is nicely sculpted, though I did have a bit of difficulty getting the two pieces together. The hands hold the spear nicely, and swap out very easily.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I honestly hadn’t intended to get this figure, at least not before seeing the movie. However, I was walking around my local Toys R Us, on the same trip where I acquired my second Striker Eureka figure. I didn’t want my only purchase to be a duplicate of something I already had, so I looked around to see if there was anything else I wanted. I came across an Engineer from Prometheus marked down to $2.50…and put it back. I do have the ability to say no! Ha ha! Anyway, I eventually came upon the Dawn figures, and I was so impressed by Caesar in person that I decided to go ahead and get one. Even if the movie’s terrible, he’s still a really great figure, most definitely worth the purchase!