Tear Jerker / Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

• The opening credits of the movie showing various different news reports explaining what happened during the previous film, the Simian Flu outbreak and the Government shutting down as a whole while soft piano music plays.
• Blue Eyes telling Caesar that Koba killed Ash, causing Blue Eyes to shed tears for his friend. Barely a minute later, he sums up the reasons for him and the other apes for blindly helping Koba in his war with the humans: "Fear makes others follow", a statement we as a species know all too well.
• After the power comes on, Dreyfus starts up a tablet PC, which has several photos on it, and breaks down sobbing. It seems that for him, getting the power on wasn't just a matter of survival, but it's possibly the only way he could look at the last mementos of the people dearest to him.
  • It gets even worse in a prequel novel once you learn the circumstances. Dreyfus has to evacuate from San Francisco and leave the plague-infested city behind. At the National Guard station he desperately tries to call his wife Maddie, and when he finally gets her, he learns that one of his sons had been infected and that his family is at risk of catching the illness. After interrogating an Alpha-Omega gang leader Dreyfus orders a car to get back into the city to save his family. Given how he reacts at seeing their photo, it's obvious that he was too late.
  • Even worse, during the initial stages of the outbreak he allowed his son Edward to go along his classmates to deliver canned food to the quarantine zones (and to impress his girlfriend) - and in spite of promising to have protective gear and hand sanitizers all time, Edward still ended up infected. Dreyfus breaking down sobbing in this film gives another horrific and sad interpretation at the same time - it can be presumed that he still blames himself for allowing his son to go outside, catch the Simian Flu and doom his family.
• The fact that for the moment, peace was possible. The humans had done it. They fixed the dam, gotten the power the city needed. Everything would've been ok, as Dreyfus would never have needed to call in the military to fight, and the city would've lived on without needing to bother the apes. And then Koba shot Caesar, and that moment vanished in fire and hate.
• A wounded Caesar at one point directs Malcolm and his group to an old, decayed house. Which is quickly revealed to be the remains of Will Rodman's home from the previous movie. Even after all this time, a part of Caesar still misses those days. He even goes up into the attic where he used to play and watches a short recording of his past in which Will teaches him some sign language. The short discussion on the matter between Malcolm and Caesar after the camcorder dies is enough to make almost anyone's eyes water a little:
  Malcolm: Who was that...in the video?
  Caesar: A good man...like you.
• At the end of the film, with all-out war on the horizon, this exchange.
  Malcolm: I thought we had a chance.
  Caesar: I... did too.
• Koba's outraged yells of 'human work?' as he points out the scars all over his body: it really hammers home that he was just an ape once, and he went through horrific abuse all his life. Humans may have made him smart, but they also made him a monster.
  • Despite how evil Koba becomes, his backstory, shown in horrifying detail in the prequel novel, is extremely tragic. He was originally an innocent, friendly ape who lived in a primate search facility with his loving mum and a kind caregiver who taught them sign language, but then his mum died defending him from an abusive drunk, and the facility's project funding was cut. Koba was then sold to a man named Tommy, who regularly forced Koba and his new chimp friend, Milo, to do silly tricks, electrocuting or beating them if they failed. When Koba finally tried to defend himself from Tommy's abuse, Tommy punished Koba by scarring and blinding his left eye. After Tommy committed suicide, it looked as if Koba and Milo would finally be able to escape together...but instead they were captured and separated by animal control officers. Koba was then sent to a lab, where he was repeatedly, cruelly and painfully experimented on and otherwise kept in complete isolation, which made him fall deep into despair and even caused him to self-harm himself. At one point, Koba formed a relationship with Amol, a scientist who knew sign language, and who Koba reluctantly allowed to experiment on him just so he could have someone to talk to. But then Amol was fired by Jacobs, who derided Koba as a "stupid, ugly monkey" before leaving Koba all alone once again. After many more years of torturous experiments, and finally being taunted again by Jacobs, who mocked the scars Koba had received and derided him as a simple animal, Koba lost all trust and affection he once had for humans, thus becoming the vicious savage we see in the movie.
• Even though he technically brought it upon himself, it's hard not to feel even a little bit sorry for Koba when he is nearly beaten/strangled to death by Caesar in front of the apes and Malcom's group. It's obviously very traumatizing and humiliating for Koba, who has already suffered so much, and the look of hurt on his face when the other apes avoid his gaze when he looks to them for support implies he feels betrayed. It is this that finally cements Koba's decision to betray Caesar.
• This conversation between Blue Eyes and Caesar, when he is getting his wound fixed.
  Blue Eyes: (sign language) I'm sorry. For everything.
  Caesar: No...I am to blame.
  Blue Eyes: (sign language) But Koba betrayed you.
  Caesar: I chose to trust him, because he is ape. I always think ape better than human, I see now how much like them we are.
• Two of the interquel videos have tearjerking moments in their own right.
  • Spread of Simian Flu is about a family struggling to survive on increasingly abandoned streets, while the mother is quarantined for contracting Simian Flu. The final scene where the daughter dances for her mother, on what is implied to be her final moments, is heartbreaking.
  • Story of the Gun is full of Tear Jerkers.
    • The origin of the gun was that it belonged to a teen that was learning how to hunt with his father, but then his father caught Simian Flu, he and his mother have to use it to loot, and he's eventually forced to sell it so he can afford food and medicine. We never find out what happened to him afterwards.
    • The lady who bought it only did so to protect her children from rioters. All of them catch Simian Flu and die.
    • A US Marshal who takes the gun for himself ends up becoming a thief himself to help his sick son, and robs a family. He ends up shooting the father who pulled a knife on him, killing him and leaving the rest of the family hysterical. He later gets shot himself by another thief while evading a hostile group. He's only alive long enough to make a face of resignation before he's shot point blank.
    • The conspiracy theorist that gets the gun next comes home from hunting and complains that his friends hadn't cleaned the house they were staying at. He starts eating and sits down in the middle of the room... and all his friends had long since died, victims of the Simian Flu. He breaks down sobbing and then uses the titular gun to commit suicide. It's also pretty clear in hindsight that he's experiencing Sanity Slippage.
    • According to Word of God, Will and Caroline died (likely from the Simian Flu) in the interlude between Rise and Dawn. This means that despite saving Apekind, Caesar's own adoptive parents died from the pandemic he helped unleash in the previous film.
• While the fact that Ellie's daughter Sarah died in the outbreak is heartbreaking enough, it's made even worse in the novelization. She had been reading Sarah's favorite book to her, and then she sneezed blood all over the pages. Sarah was three years old when she contracted the Simian flu.
• After Dreyfus detonates the explosives on the tower's support beams, interrupting the fight between Koba and Caesar, Caesar is in the middle of helping wounded or trapped apes. Some apes did not survive. One in particular is laying limply on a metal beam, still visible in much of the remainder of the scene. Furthermore, when Koba drags himself out of the rubble and sees Caesar still alive, he quietly approaches an ape trapped whimpering and gasping underneath a reel of heavy metal bits. He lifts it off of the wounded ape for a brief second, grabs the rifle the ape had been carrying, then just drops it back onto the poor ape, most likely sealing his fate.
  • Said ape happens to be Grey, one of Koba's own loyal followers. Imagine the betrayal he must have felt, thinking the leader he respected was going to save him: only to steal his weapon and leave him to die.
• Although it was extremely deserved, it’s hard not to feel sadness from Koba’s death. At the beginning of the movie, he was a good and loyal friend to Caesar and an Honorary Uncle to Blue Eyes. Sadly, Koba’s deep hatred for humans and his inability to let go of the memory of the horrors they put him through, unleashed the monster inside, destroying his good relationships with the other apes. Even worse is that we see Koba fall to his death from Caesar's point of view: he had to watch the ape he once considered brother plummet to his painful demise, crashing into debris and wires on the way down, because he was too far gone and beyond redemption.

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