Three Reasons Why Amazon’s New Storage Service Won’t Kill Dropbox


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Amazon



Today Amazon introduced a new file storage and collaboration service called Zocalo that—on first blush, at least, looks like it might be a Dropbox killer. Much like Dropbox and other cloud storage services, Zocalo lets you sync files between the Amazon cloud and your phone or PC. It has a business twist too, helping IT staffers control who gets access to which files.


The product must be making some Dropbox executives uneasy, because unlike its other big competitors—Google and Microsoft— Dropbox itself is a pretty big Amazon customer. The startup uses Amazon’s S3 storage service to store the more than 500 million files that get uploaded to Dropbox each day.


That’s going to make it pretty much impossible for Dropbox to undercut Amazon’s pricing. Zocalo starts at $5 per user per month for 200GB of storage. Dropbox charges twice that for half as much storage.


But price isn’t everything, and Dropbox still has a several advantages that Amazon will be hard-pressed to overcome.


1. Sync is incredibly hard to get right


Dropbox’s greatest strength is that it makes syncing files with the cloud and sharing them with other users seem so easy. But it’s not. Behind the scenes, Dropbox has a vast system of software keeping track of which files have been edited when, and who has access to what. Sync is a particularly difficult problem, and one small bug can lay waste to years of important user data. Err the other way, and you’re constantly resurrecting long-deleted files.


Amazon has the technical chops to build a reliable storage and synchronization system, but making it as invisible to the end-user as Dropbox is no easy task. Dropbox has a seven-year head start here. And customers have shown, again and again, that they’re actually happy to pay more money for a tool with fewer features as long as it’s easy to use.


2. Dropbox’s “users first” strategy


Dropbox’s strategy has always been to win end-users over first, then sell to the business side. Amazon is taking the opposite approach, by appealing directly to businesses. The problem with this approach is that even if Amazon is successful in selling its service to a business, the managers of that business still have to convince their employees to use it. Employees who are already Dropbox might not want to make the switch — especially if Zocalo ends up being even slightly harder to use than Dropbox.


Could Amazon appeal directly to end users in this space? It already tried that with Amazon Cloud Drive, which is still around, but has been largely forgotten since its 2011 launch.


3. Branding


Amazon already has a dizzying number of services and features under the Amazon Web Services umbrella, and it can be hard to keep track of them all. And the company is always adding more. That means it could be easy for the product to be overlooked, much as Cloud Drive has.


That’s made all the worse by the name Zocalo. In Spanish, Zócalo means “plinth,” which is a platform for pillars or statues. It can also refer to the Plaza de la Constitución, the public square in the center of Mexico City. Unfortunately, it’s not a word that means much to non-Spanish speakers, and it’s particularly hard to remember. Bu now, just about everybody knows about Dropbox.


Independence Ahead?


Of course it’s not all smooth sailing for Dropbox and other competitors. This move will put pricing pressure on Dropbox, and it may need to spend some of $1.1 billion it’s raised on gaining more independence from Amazon. Startups are always in danger of being squashed by larger companies and bigger marketing budgets and the ability to undercut them on cost. But that problem is magnified when you’re running your service on infrastructure owned and operated by the same big companies you have to compete with. We’ve already seen this with Amazon Prime, which competes with Netflix, another major Amazon Web Services customer.


But Amazon is still a long way from killing Netflix, and that’s good news for Dropbox.



This Week’s Best Trailers: Sharknado 2! More Guardians! Christian Bale Is Moses?


It’s a mad mad mad mad world at the movies this week. Biblical Egypt is on the brink of death-by-plagues, along with the credibility of Ridley Scott; Ben Affleck is a hunted man; Terry Gilliam is re-opening his freak show with Christoph Waltz as the main attraction; and there’s a mighty big sharknado brewing over Manhattan. Thank the gods we have galaxy guardians and a Mockingjay to lift our spirits and protect us from evil doers, because these trailers are packing a ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb sized punches!


The One Everyone Is Talking About: Gone Girl



You Can Carry Yeti’s Tough New Cooler Like a Totebag


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Yeti



In terms of durability, Yeti’s coolers are the opposite of those five-dollar styrofoam things that fall apart as soon as you put a 12-pack of Hamm’s in them. The company’s specialty is making incredibly tough, well-insulated, very pricy coolers that can withstand the odd bear attack and keep a bag of ice frozen for more than a week.


If Yeti coolers have had a weak spot, it’s that they haven’t been super-toteable unti now. The company just announced its first soft-side portable cooler, the Yeti Hopper, which should be much easier to haul along on hikes. Rather than just slap a “Yeti” logo on a cheap soft-shell cooler, they went all out to make it durable and insulated enough to be worthy of the name.


The Yeti Hopper weighs 5.5-pounds empty, and it can hold up to 5.2 gallons of camping treats—enough room for an 18-pack of oat sodas or a 20-pound bag of ice. But what about potato salad? How many quarts of potato salad can it hold? The answer is nine quarts of potato salad.


This portable cooler has double-stitched reinforced handle straps to go along with its watertight zipper, tear-proof shell, and thick insulation. According to Yeti, the airtight zipper means that the cooler bag can be tipped completely upside down with a melted 20-pound bag of ice inside it without any leakage whatsoever.


The Hopper’s puncture-resistant shell is made of nylon coated with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), similar to the material used for whitewater rafts. There’s an antimicrobial/antifungal coating inside and out, and all the seams are RF-welded to ensure that they’re airtight. The cooler also tapers down at the top end, near the zipper, to minimize the chances of cold leaking out.


Keeping everything insulated is an inch-thick layer of dense closed-cell foam on the sides of the cooler and a 1.5-inch layer of it on the base. There are no official stats on how long it will keep a bag of ice icy, but Yeti claims you should have “ice for days.”


No surprise: This thing is very expensive for a cooler. The Yeti Hopper will cost $300 when it’s released in October.


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Yeti




Worn Out


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



Remember when cellphones used to be big, giant bricks tethered to a suitcase? That’s where we are with smartwatches. They’re big giant bricks strapped to your wrist…and tethered to your smartphone over Bluetooth LE. And like those early cellphones, today’s smartwatches are also very limited in terms of functionality.


Google’s Android Wear platform is poised to change the latter, while hardware manufacturers like LG aim to improve on the former. The company’s new G Watch is the first of three Android Wear smartwatches—the other two being the Motorola Moto 360 and Samsung Gear Live. It comes with an always-on, 1.65-inch LCD display and a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor with 4 GB of memory. It’s kind of like a tiny little smartphone strapped to your wrist. Kind of.


In reality, the G Watch feels like the worst parts of your smartphone strapped to your wrist, plus Google Now and some third-party app integration.


On the hardware side, the G Watch comes with a 280 x 280 pixel resolution LCD display that’s bright and clear, although it’s basically unreadable in bright sunlight. A replaceable 22mm synthetic band straps that LCD watch face to your wrist. The band, inlaid with shallow diamond-shaped indentations on the inside, feels very thick. It never just blends seamlessly into your daily experience—you’re well aware there’s a watch there. The hefty watch face doesn’t help matters either. Its rectangular face measures approximately 38mm x 47mm x 10mm, and the bottom is completely flat, save for slightly rounded edges.


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



I had difficulty getting the watch to fit just right: At one notch, it was slightly too tight, the bottom of the watch pressing unconformably against my wrist bone (my pediatrician once told a younger me that I have very “prominent bones”). Set at the next notch, making the band slightly looser, the watch face would bang into my hand as I swung my arms while walking. And it’s not like I walk with a ton of swagger or anything.

But the hardware is only half the story. While Android Wear has promise—the user interface is clean and intuitive, and there’s a clear, easy way for third party developers to get their apps onboard—it’s hardly a savior for our smartphone woes. In fact, the watch is mostly a hell of constant, vibrating notifications. You swipe one away, and a short time later it returns (“Come on, I’ve deleted this calendar notification twice already!”) or it’s replaced by another. You can cease the constant buzzing by going into the Android Wear app and selecting which ones you don’t want notifications from; you can also temporarily silence the watch. But in both cases, it silences indiscriminately. First thing I did after setting up the G Watch was to remove Gmail notifications, because despite the spam filters of both Conde Nast and Google, I still get roughly a hundred thousand spam emails a day. But now, while I don’t get notifications when Dr. Xander M. Fong requests I transfer funds to a Nigerian prince, I also don’t get notifications when my boss sends out a memo. So yeah, more granular notification controls are needed for the notification experience to be worthwhile.


Luckily there’s far more to the watch than just Gmail notifications. Android Wear’s third party app ecosystem promises to open up infinitely more use cases. After granting developers access to its API on the 7th, there are currently 33 Android Wear-optimized apps, including software from entities like Pinterest, Runtastic, Eat24, and BandsInTown. For now, many of these integrations are limited to passing along notifications from the smartphone to your wrist, so they’re only as useful as the notifications themselves. You can do things like get directions to a nearby location you’ve pinned on Pinterest, or get alerted and RSVP to a new upcoming concert on BandsInTown. More useful: Things like the ability to re-order food from the G Watch using Eat24’s Android Wear integrated app. I expect we’ll see more of this type of creative, useful functionality as Android Wear matures.


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



One thing LG’s G Watch does do well is voice control. You don’t even have to hold the watch up to your face, a simple utterance of “OK Google” instantly brings up the voice command interface, letting you record a note, set an alarm, make a simple query, search directions on Google Maps, and more. When you get a text or Hangout, you can dictate and send a reply straight from the watch. It does a stellar job of interpreting what you say so long as you’re in a reasonably quiet location. In a noisy bar though, it took multiple tries to get “OK Google” to register.

The G Watch, like all Android Wear watches, is water and sweat resistant. But unlike a dedicated fitness wearable, it isn’t truly waterproof. It charges in a small cradle that the watch face magnetically snaps into. You can easily use 80 to 100 percent of its battery in a day, so you’ll want to keep this charging cradle at your office desk or by your bedside.


The goal of wearables, smartwatches in particular, is to free you from your smartphone dependence. “Look, now you don’t need to pull your phone out of your pocket to check what that notification was. A discreet glance at your wrist will let you know if it’s important or not!” False. When your wrist is vibrating constantly it’s both irritating and distracting for you and everyone else around you. And unlike a smartphone tucked away in a bag or pocket, you can’t ignore it.



Call It, Maybe


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



It’s 3 in the morning and my daughter is crying in her crib. I pick her up, and rock her back to sleep. But when I lean over to place her back in the crib, the screen on my watch lights up, waking her once more. This is an unintended consequence of my watch’s ability to sense my movements, and it has come alive in anticipation that I may want something from it. But what I really want is to go back to bed.


The watch on my wrist, Samsung Gear Live, is one of two Android Wear watches already on sale. The other, the LG G Watch, is reviewed here. A third, the Motorola 360, is coming soon.


For years now, smart watches like these have been “coming soon.” Well, here they are. And it’s worth thinking about what they do, and how well they do it.


The main thing I’ve found that Android Wear smart watches do well—much like Android itself—is eliminate clutter. Thanks to recent updates to Google’s mobile OS, the barrage of emails and tweets that flood onto your phone during the day can be more easily dismissed and trashed and shunted aside by tapping or swiping on the notifications as they appear on the phone’s screen. And now, you can tap or swipe on those notifications from the watch face too. It is a wonderfully efficient way of managing digital clutter.


But overall, it feels like an evolution—as opposed to the revolution of the first iPhone and Android devices. It is not something entirely new, at least not yet. It is simply a way of shifting certain actions from one screen to another. It promises to do some things uniquely, but ultimately it is a triage system for your notifications. An alert system.


Driving in my car, my watch vibrates on my wrist. A new text message from my father has arrived. This is the Ur use case for wearables—acting on items without diving deep into a smartphone application. But there’s a problem. While my watch will listen to me, it doesn’t ever speak. There is no speaker, nor can I even command it to “read me my text” to have the message play on my phone’s speaker. So I still have to fiddle with a screen to read the message. Given the screen’s small size, it occurs to me that this is even more dangerous than looking at it on my phone. Replying, however, is effortless. I talk, and it sends him a perfectly transcribed response. A miracle, if a minor one.


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



That dissonance between utility and uselessness is the core experience. Some of the things that Android Wear, and specifically the Gear Live can do are really great. I’ve already sent very many text messages and emails from my wrist, without pausing what it was I was doing. It is especially true of very short messages, which it fields with aplomb. If you need to send something longer, you are still going to want your phone or even your computer. But voice actions for SMS—a short-format medium by nature—are great.


I’m hopeful Facebook and Twitter will roll out versions of their apps that support Android Wear voice actions, but neither company has shown much enthusiasm for the platform yet. Hopefully that will change, because the ability to run a voice command and update your status without having to take out your phone and unlock it is really hot.


“OK Google,” I say to my wrist, “play William Onyeabor.” On my phone, Google Play All Access Music Jukebox, or whatever it’s called this week, fires up and begins streaming “Atomic Bomb.” My phone is in my pocket, headphone cables snake up to my ears. It’s awesome. So what if the other people on the bus are looking at me. Who cares. I close my eyes and listen. I’m going to explode.


One of the bigger drawbacks of the Gear Live is that it’s a total battery hog. I’ve never gotten more than 24 hours out of it. One way to handle this is by charging it every night when you go to sleep. Yet one of the chief things I like about wearing a timepiece is being able to look at it when I wake up in the night, which you can’t do when it’s docked somewhere charging. Nor do I always remember to take it off at night (see above) which means I wake up with it dead on occasion.


Worse, the charging cradle is garbage. It’s difficult to click the watch in and out of it. Despite doing it every day, it never gets easier. It’s also a cheap little piece of plastic, that’s poorly designed so that it doesn’t sit well on a desk. It is remarkable to me that a product manager somewhere thought it was acceptable to ship a $200 watch, a miracle of glass and silicon and lithium-ion, with this horrible little plastic nub that looks like something you accidentally broke off of your LEGO Mindstorm kit.


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



I have trouble seeing my watch in bright sunlight, and just about can’t see it at all when I’m wearing my sunglasses—that’s a much bigger deal on a watch than a smartphone. Conversely, it can be much too bright in a dark room. You can place your hand over the screen to dim it, and you can also mute it which will keep the screen from coming alive when you raise your wrist. But forget to mute it, or tap it accidentally, and it’s going to annoy you at the movies, or in a dark room where your child is trying to sleep.

On Sunday, as I’m out and about, my watch buzzes to tell me I’ve taken 10,000 steps. Hooray! I’ve met my goal. I take another two thousand more before the day is through. Monday is a work day and I spend it sitting down and only make it 6,975 steps. My watch doesn’t notice. It bothers me about all sorts of things. It has a fitness app. Why not make it useful by prompting me to be more active?


The vibrations this thing puts off take some getting used to. For the first few days I wore it, every time someone called me, which would set off a series of hard vibrations on my wrist, it scared the shit out of me. Even once I became accustomed to it to the point where it no longer startled, I still found it very annoying.


At the end of the day, when I’m really really exhausted, I raise my wrist and mutter, “OK google, call a car.” Lyft fires. It knows just where I am. Within (literally) seconds, a car is on its way to me. Well, that was easy. Maybe too easy? At my desk, I am showing how easy it is to call a car, and accidentally ordered one. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to cancel as well.


Once, I had to take a minute and reboot my watch. No big deal at all, but an odd experience.


A notification flashes on my wrist. It’s from Google+. It tells me that 11 photos are ready to share. There is a small preview of one. It’s a picture I took of my family, my wife and children, all asleep. It’s really beautiful. I swipe to the left to see the others, but there’s only an option to share. I swipe back to the right to go back to that original image. I swipe up. Nothing happens. I swipe down. Nothing happens. I wonder about the other ten photos. I wonder who I would share a bunch of pictures I’ve never seen with. Why Google+, why? Some of the actions that developers are taking with Android Wear—even Google—are puzzling or poorly thought out.


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Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



The clasp on this thing is really nice. You can replace the band, but there’s no real reason to do so. And generally speaking, the hardware is nice-not-wonderful. It is noticeably big, but not ridiculous by any stretch. It is too dim, and yet still can’t get great battery life. It doesn’t have a front side camera or a speaker, which would make it a Dick Tracy device suitable for Hangouts and Skype calls. It seems such a waste for this to only be about text, and to only be able to input audio, rather than play it as well.

Overall this is a success. Do you love gadgets? Get it. You’ll enjoy playing with it and as more apps come along it’s just going to get more useful. But it isn’t for everyone. It lacks the gee-whiz factor of Google Glass, while offering no more utility (although you probably won’t get laughed at for wearing it). It needs a better reason to exist, which it doesn’t have yet.



Dazzling Crystal DSLR Replicas That Are Somehow Affordable


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Fotodiox



Mesmerizing as this video is, there’s a way to see right through your camera without taking a belt sander to it. Fotodiox’s crystal replicas of DSLRs cost less ($90) than you’d expect a full-on crystal DSLR to cost. Granted, these 2/3 scale replicas don’t actually take photos, but still.


There are two variations of this see-through camera, each weighing around 3 pounds. They’ve been around for a few years, which is evident in the models available: The Canon EOS 7D and the Nikon D90, both of which are at least five years old.


In terms of specs that don’t mean anything because these are non-functional translucent cameras, the Nikon version comes with a crystal 50mm F1.4 prime. The Canon 7D comes with a 15-85mm/F3.5-F5.6 kit zoom lens. (Don’t forget to factor in the completely irrelevant 1.5X focal-length multiplier for the Nikon and 1.6X multiplier for the Canon!) Although they’re replicas of interchangeable-lens cameras, those crystal optics aren’t swappable.


Instead of taking photos, they are built for holding paper down on your desk. They should do the trick because they are heavier than several sheets of paper. Beyond that, they can help you achieve the following goals:


- Cheat at ice-sculpture contests

- One-up that guy who won’t shut up about his Pentax LX Special Gold Edition

- Round out your “Slim Goodbody: Photographer” Halloween costume

- Tell people you own Wonder Woman’s camera

- Practice taking photographs without consuming battery life or SD card space


If you are dead set on buying a crystal DSLR but need a little more practicality in your purchase, consider the Fotodiox Pro Gift bundle. For $115, you get a crystal DSLR, a movie clapboard, and a fully functional (and opaque) twin-lens reflex camera that uses 35mm film.


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Fotodiox




Angry Nerd: Why Guardians of the Galaxy Works Where Spider-Man Fails Hard


Is it too much to ask for a comic book flick that doesn’t rely on three crappy prequels for the plot to make sense? Let’s lose the complicated, interwoven storylines and focus on quality standalone films. Angry Nerd explains why Marvel’s new Guardians of the Galaxy gets it just right.



The TSA’s Ban on Uncharged Cellphones Isn’t as Stupid as It Sounds


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WIRED



The Transportation Security Administration has found yet another way to make traveling terrible: Passengers boarding U.S.-bound flights at some foreign airports will not be allowed to board with electronic devices that don’t have enough juice to turn on. Forget to charge your gadget and being stuck in line without the joy of checking Twitter is the least of your worries. You’ll have to throw your phone away when it’s finally your turn to run the screening gauntlet.


The new rule—announced with no explanation of why it’s been created—has been widely and swiftly lampooned as one more example of TSA nonsense. It’s impressive that the agency has managed to make the already crummy ordeal of flying even worse. But don’t assume this is more TSA idiocy just yet.


The rule change may be obnoxious, but it’s not stupid, says Rafi Ron, the former director of security at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, notorious for its strict screening procedures. The TSA is likely responding to new intelligence that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has developed explosives that are difficult to detect with current technology, Ron says. That calls for a change in procedure.


“I think that the measures that are taken make a lot of sense,” Ron says.


It should be noted that Ron is not a TSA apologist. He’s the guy who called the agency’s decision to make us all remove our shoes in response to Richard Reid’s shoe bomb debacle “an extremely unintelligent conclusion.”


Ensuring a phone turns on is a quick, easy and low-tech—if not foolproof—way of checking that its battery hasn’t been replaced with a bomb. The fact that it applies only to passengers flying into the United States from select (and unspecified) airports, shows the TSA is targeting its approach.


That said, it does seem strange that, as an anonymous TSA employee notes to WIRED, the TSA needs to do this at all, given that it already uses an explosive trace detection machine. Plus, there is the risk that turning on a gadget containing a bomb might trigger it.


Whatever the answer, the TSA must implement its new rule logically. That is not something the TSA is known for. Jason E. Harrington, a former TSA officer and a critic of the agency, doesn’t hold out much hope that logic will prevail. “Nearly all of the security workforce, in all likelihood, will be mindlessly waving through passengers with powered-up electronics – because when you work front-line security with an inflexible checklist as your guide, you find it’s easy to let critical thinking take a backseat to basic standard operating procedure compliance,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian .


“Meanwhile, at least one old lady will probably arrive at every airport checkpoint each day having forgotten to charge her beat-up old flip-phone, which an agent will inevitably toss into the checkpoint trash bin.”


The TSA has kept quiet about how it plans to implement the rule—the announcement is all of four sentences long—but we hope it at least considers putting an array of in the airport. That way, passengers who show up with a dead battery don’t have to throw their gadgets away, and this becomes just one more in a long list of inconveniences.


There is another, much more nefarious element to the new rule: Accusations that it has nothing to do with explosives, but is rather a way for the Department of Homeland security to better surveil us through our devices. The theory goes that if the phone’s battery is dead, it can’t be tracked. There’s an easy workaround for those who are worried about that: Once you’re through security, pop out the battery and enjoy your flight.



How Planet of the Apes’ Andy Serkis Will Conquer Hollywood


Andy Serkis on the set of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Andy Serkis on the set of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. David James/20th Century Fox



Andy Serkis is on a quest. He hasn’t said so outright, but it’s true. He’s on a mission to become a whole new breed of Hollywood power player, a multi-hyphenate like never before: performance-capture-actor-director-studio-honcho. Or something like that.


Serkis, who started out as a stage and TV actor before becoming known for his portrayal of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, is about to prove just how nuanced and powerful a motion-capture performance can be. As Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes , out Friday, he’s playing a far more complex and intense version of his character from Rise of the Planet of the Apes—and this time he’s the primary focus of the film. Yet, he pulls it off so masterfully that it may be hard to ignore him come Oscar season.


“He is one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” says Dawn director Matt Reeves. “This guy is amazing. People ask me if there should be a different [awards] category for mo-cap performance, and the answer is ‘absolutely not.’ Because there’s no difference between the way I dealt with him and the way I dealt with Gary Oldman or Jason Clarke or Keri Russell.”


And Dawn is just the beginning. In addition to (presumably) being in the next Planet of the Apes flick Reeves is set to direct, Serkis is also slated to appear in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII and has an unnamed-but-not-Thanos role in Avengers: Age of Ultron (he’s also been helping Mark Ruffalo perfect his Hulk act). After that, Serkis is on the hook to direct adaptations of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and George Orwell’s Animal Farm in conjunction with his performance-capture studio, The Imaginarium. WIRED sat down with Serkis in San Francisco to ask him about the many ways he’s conquering Hollywood.


Mastering Apes. And Gollum. And Kong.


Even though he started out as a traditional thespian, Serkis made his name with performance-capture roles in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and King Kong. Since then, he’s become the go-to guy when a director needs someone to act out a non-human part. Reeves, who picked up the Apes franchise from Rise director Rupert Wyatt, says it was a “big relief” to go into his first performance-capture movie with Serkis once he “realized that the reason Caesar was so amazing was that Andy was so amazing.”


Andy Serkis.

Andy Serkis. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED



For Serkis, mastering the technique comes from a very well-honed method. This is particularly true for his portrayal of Caesar: “Most people think you start from the ape perspective, but I’ve always played Caesar as a human in ape skin. He’s very much an outsider. Really, Caesar is all about the conflict, about his lack of identity. As an adult male who has led his species to freedom, he is now trying to teach them—the tenets of belief he’s trying to pass on are not just purely ape beliefs, they’re a combination of human and ape beliefs. So it is ultimately a dance—between anthropomorphizing him and making him more human, and keeping him ape.”

Giving Oscar-Worthy Performances


The thing that’s most striking about Serkis’ Caesar in Dawn is that he is, essentially, the leading man. (Yes, we know: leading ape.) Unlike previous characters like Gollum, Caesar has as much (if not more) screen-time than his co-stars and does a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting. He could be an Oscar contender—except the Academy seems not to know quite how to handle performance-capture. Is it an acting award? Or a visual effects one (in which case Weta Digital would be nominated for animating Serkis’ performance)? Or should there be a whole new category? “It’s a long-standing debate, really, but I’ve always held that there shouldn’t be a separate category,” Serkis says. “This is acting, and the acting part of it what it is authoring the performance on set. Then, of course, there’s visual effects—the rendering and the artistry and the animation that goes on top to take our performances and put them [on screen]. That’s a visual effects category. So I don’t think blending them makes any sense whatsoever.”


Winning Spots in Upcoming Star Wars Flicks


Reeves isn’t sure if he’s directly responsible for getting his friend J.J. Abrams to hire Serkis for Star Wars: Episode VII, but he did show Abrams some early footage of Serkis in action and “he said to me, ‘I’m not kidding when I tell you I think that’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.’” And now, he’s Episode VII. So who is he playing? “I [can't say] not a tiny, weenie bit or I’ll be taken to a galaxy far away and beaten up with a lightsaber,” Serkis says. “But I know that J.J.’s aesthetic and the way that he wants to shoot this movie is absolutely phenomenal.”


Move Into Directing


It’s almost a cliché when actors are say, “Well, I’d really like to direct.” But Serkis isn’t just saying it; he’s doing it. He’s been Jackson’s second unit director on The Hobbit films and has some directing gigs lined up with his London studio, The Imaginarium. “I’ve been heading in this direction for some time,” he says. “In the last three years I’ve been moving very much towards helming and telling stories, as well as acting in them.”