Welcome to Self-Awareness - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

It's a tale of lost hopes, for both apes and humans.  Both communities fray and come apart, with disastrous consequences for the other.  Both communities have leaders bickering amongst each other, for war and for peace.  The human community is desperate for electrical power, and willing to kill to get a hydro-electric dam the apes live next to working again.  The ape community doesn't trust humans, after being treated cruelly in various forms of human captivity.  The humans mistakenly resent the apes for the simian flu that wiped out the rest of humanity, sinking them back into the dark ages.  Neither community has any good feelings for the other.

Warning: Obvious Animal Farm Reference!

They meet without expecting too, in an ugly incident that scares and angers both communities.  The human leaders and apes set conditions that our plucky band of human heroes struggles to meet as they work, sometimes together, to repair the dam and turn the generator back on.  There's oohing and aahing over a baby chimpanzee that almost brings apes and humans together, until another ugly incident almost ruins their plans for the damn.  There's a human who saves the life of one of the females who has just given birth, which gives everyone the chance to finish the task despite mistrust and anger.  There's Maurice, a gentle orangutan, wiser than the others, who finds himself interested in the humans and their books.

Shared baby love!

The main conflict of the story is between Caesar and Koba, two chimpanzees leading a band of a few hundred chimpanzees (calling them chimps when they can talk just seems like a slur).  There are human conflicts, especially between Malcolm, leading the human team to restart the hydro-electric dam, and Dreyfuss, wanting electricity and contact with the world outside San Francisco at all costs.  Carver, a jumpy, gun-toting fool, is in conflict with the rest of the dam team and the apes.  These conflicts fade as the other humans Malcolm disagreed with die during the film. Caesar and Koba's falling out, Koba's vicious betrayal, and Caesar's justice in the end, slowly take center stage.  As apes, they have a distinctive way of showing who owes loyalty to whom.  As Caesar and Koba's deep friendship turns to hatred, their "handshakes", showing Koba's loyalty to Caesar, and Caesar's trust of Koba, become briefer.  As Koba brings vicious, Game of Thrones-style plotting to ape civilization, Koba also hoodwinks Caesar's teenaged-son Blue Eyes, who realizes almost too late that he owed his father his loyalty all along.

Koba has good reason to hate humans, as he spent his early life as a test animal in a lab, basically being tortured in the name of science.  Caesar, as the adopted "child" of a researcher from the lab, has every reason to think there are good humans, even if they can be annoying.  Blue Eyes has almost never seen a human, and is a new generation of chimpanzee, who only knows of human mistreatment and civilization from stories.  He and his teenaged buddy, Ash, are prime for Koba's schemes.  As Koba's paranoia and hatred for humans puts him in conflict with Caesar, and with a small group of apes still loyal to Caesar, Koba becomes what he hates in humans.  However, since this leads to a ridiculously awesome shot of Koba riding a horse and firing two machine guns while a fire burns all around him, it seems like the conflict was worth it.

Holy fuck, yes, totally worth it

Not so for Caesar, even though he eventually wins his conflict with Koba.  Not so for Malcolm, though he and Caesar are best buds at the end, and the humans captured by Koba have been freed.  Not so for Blue Eyes, who will lose his friend Ash to Koba's greed for power.  Despite the stalemate fought to between humans and apes, the war is just beginning between them.  Caesar declares, at the end, that the apes started this war, but it's easy to point fingers at humans who unknowingly played right into Koba's hands; Dreyfuss, who wants to invade and slaughter the apes if they won't allow Malcolm's team to save the city; and Carver, who breaks the apes' conditions and is forced to admit being a total asshole by literally every other member of the human team.  There were apes who were more than happy to march to San Fran with Koba for revenge; but they lost their taste for blood early, and didn't want to kill scared and obviously innocent humans.  

Despite Caesar's hopes for a Great Ape Society, peaceful and strong and intelligent, their society is now one where apes will plot against each other, hurt each other, even imprison each other.  Malcolm must accept leaving his home, just after re-establishing electrical power and thinking his human settlement was finally safe.  When Caesar and Malcolm part at the end, after the ape version of a hug, both have accepted that, despite their friendship, their societies will never be the same, and never get along.

Actually we're all apes.