Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate's spoiler special podcast of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Joining me from Slate's D.C. studio is Dave Wigle, Slate's political reporter. Hi, Dave.

Hi, thanks for having me again.

Yeah, I'm really glad you could come into spoil. Have we spoiled anything since World War Z? I don't think we have, which means the total body count for all the movies we've spoiled is about 14 billion, maybe 13 billion.

The planet of the, our planet has died twice over, just in our discussions alone. We spoil Captain

Phillips together as well. Okay, just a couple of pirates and then whoever, and then the Rumsfeld movie.

So this is probably the most genocidal or xenocidal movie we have covered.

Well, it depends.

Are we including all Iraq war casualties in the body count?

Even if you include Iraq War's Casualties, I think this movie kills more human beings than anything we've seen thus far.

Because even the zombies used to be human.

But it sounds like I'm spoiling the entire movie, but everything I've said is given away in a little animated sequence when the movie begins.

So, I mean, you could probably start to spoil the rest of the drama here because if you relate to the movie, you really needed to hear me say all of humanity dies.

Right.

Yeah, because essentially the movie picks up almost the second, the last movie left

off, which is the moment that this Simeon flu, this ape virus, begins to spread throughout

the earth, right? And it's implied at the end of the last movie, I think in a similar way,

with these kind of globes of the world lighting up in various places, that the ape flu has

already started to spread. So as this movie starts,

I believe it's 10 years later. At some point, the apes seem to say it's 10 years later, which

doesn't seem like... Ten winters have passed. Maybe ape winters are different, but it doesn't

seem like quite enough time for that much devastation to have been visited upon the earth. Essentially,

...