Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review
Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review
Directed my Rupert Wyatt, starring James Franco, Andy Serkis, John Lithgow, Tyler Labine, and Freida Pinto
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No question about it: apes are astonishingly strong. Edgar Allan Poe's sinister simian from Murders in the Rue Morgue scalped victims with his bare hands and hurled their bodies great distances with ease. Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional primates were likewise possessed of stunning strength, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island talks of Jupiter, an orangutan who effortlessly drags a wedged wagon from mire.
Apes can be aggressive. True story: In February 2009 Charla Nash's face was torn to tatters in a vicious, sudden attack by Travis, a 200 lb. pet chimpanzee. The woman's nose was ripped completely off, her jaw and mouth destroyed, and she lost both her eyes and her hands in mere moments. The chimp's owner stabbed Travis repeatedly with a kitchen knife in an attempt to stop the slaughter, but it was only after being shot more than once by responding police that Travis was stopped — and even then, he lived long enough to run away, returning to his bed to die.
They're strong, hard to kill, and they can be ferocious. We know that. But how intelligent is an ape? When given wonder drug ALZ 112, it would appear they can be very intelligent indeed. In fact, enhanced anthropoids hit the trifecta and take over the whole world in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The latest in the sci-fi series (which debuted in 1968) is also one of the best.
But it's not what I expected, given the previous entries in the long-loping series. The first one is still the standard (if not the hokiest), but some solid sequels followed, as did an ambitious Tim Burton remake not too terribly long ago. When a studio suit or a filmmaker proclaims, "We're going to reinvent!" I usually sigh and think they might as well be trying to reinvent the wheel. But Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes the right route, by presenting the story as a slick and savvy prequel.
Meet yet another hot scientist (where does M.I.T. find these folks? Well, at least they didn't name him Dr. Christmas Jones), Will Rodman (James Franco) who's working on a top secret super-drug experiment that goes horribly awry. Spurred on by GenSys Labs' resident corner office-dwelling designer suit-wearing greed-and-fame monger (David Oyelowo), Will tests the drug on a pregnant chimp who winds up going berserk during a hoity-toity presentation — and presto! Will is surrogate daddy to a newborn ape whose DNA is infused with ALZ 112.
Only a select few know the little orphan is being harbored in Will's residential neighborhood home, so Caesar (mo-cap performance by Andy Serkis, zapped to life by Joe Letteri's Weta Digital) grows up with the heightened mentality and instinct of both ape and child, not to mention in possession of incredible strength and awesome agility. But no aggression… not yet, anyway.
Meantime, Will's Alzheimer afflicted father Charles (John Lithgow) gets a dose of his own son's medicine and viola! he's not only cured, he is improved. Everything is cookies and ice cream until one day when Caesar runs afoul of Will's next-door neighbor who puts the kibosh on the test-tube family and sees that the teenage chimp is sent away to live in a simian sanctuary which turns out to be anything but a safe haven.
Serkis really shows his chimp-chops here (having cut his teeth, so to speak, as King Kong a few years back), conveying everything from fear to forcefulness through his singularly expressive eyes (hm… are CG eyes Windows XP to the soul?).
New characters enter the picture — bad guy John Landon (Brian Cox) and good gal Caroline (Frieda Pinto), both primatologists — and once Caesar is just another animal in a cage, the movie takes a turgid turn.
In the beginning, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is quite engrossing and engaging as a character study and it's emotionally gripping when Will plays surrogate parent to the primate and his own ailing papa. In the middle part of the film, focus shifts almost entirely to Caesar and his plight. Although I will say all the interplay and politics between the animals are (to me, anyway) far less exciting than any episode of Meerkat Manor, it's no less an essential build up to the inevitable uprising, escape and revenge of the creatures against their oppressors and enemies. Mo-cap acumen lends authenticity to the knowledge that yes: an errant ape can and will bash the human head to mush.
The movie's mostly humorless, but a couple of cute if overly obvious tributes to the classic Apes flicks fit in fine and coaxed cheers from the crowd. There are the expected loops in logic; one-note characters only there to be introduced and then serve as so many banana-splits once the apes get wise and get mad; plus some d'oh! missed opportunities, but those are minor quibbles.
Perhaps the obstacle to complete surrender to Caesar and his brethren is in my own head: somewhere in the back of this ALZ 113 -devoid brain of mine, I know each and every one of those apes is a mass of pixels (marvelous and magnificent as the technology is) and therefore I don't care. (Then again, some entirely fabricated characters from past movies did make me care — E.T., Roger Rabbit, Puss in Boots, Gollum, and Davy Jones to name a few… and then again, those were supposed to be fake: Caesar is meant to be a real chimpanzee.)
While the movie may have sagged a tad in the middle for me, it rallied beautifully in the end with a rampage to rival The Expendables' climax as led by Michael Douglas in Falling Down — our hero's just a little furrier. I won't give too much away except to say… stick around for the 12 Monkeys nod after the first name credit hits the screen.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes may not be my personal favorite film so far this year, but I do believe it's got the goods to be the first bona fide sci-fi blockbuster of the summer. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson