Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an exciting,
visually dazzling prequel to the great sci-fi thriller
franchise about a future world in which simians take
over the earth and subjugate humans. A combination of
elements of Project Nim and 28 Days Later with a dash
of The Shawshank Rebellion, this movie gives us James
Franco as a scientist who develops a brain
regeneration serum for Alzheimer's. Testing it on
chimps, he finds it increases their intelligence
exponentially and almost instantly. Exciting mayhem
follows. And up-to-date technology using "motion
capture" technology developed for James Cameron's
Avatar and CGI to make the anthropomorphic apes much
more real looking in crowd scenes and closeups than in
the Sixties and Seventies films. Trouble is, this is
only half of a pop intellectual thriller because as
the movie progresses the computer generated imagery
and loud music meld into a violent conflict so the
subtleties tend to get submerged in fighting and
explosions. Except for an initial kernel of
information there is not a lot that is new here, but
it sure looks sharp in its (expensive)
state-of-the-art computerized clothing. Even if this
movie offers more to the eye than to the mind and
heart, it shows the Apes series still retains its
magic.
Will Rodman (Franco) is a San Francisco researcher for
Gen-Sys, a genetic engineering medical firm, with a
personal stake in trying to find a cure for
Alzheimer's because his dad Charles (John Lithgow)
already shows advanced symptoms, though he still can
live at home. Will's boss, Jacobs (David Oyelowo),
whose eye is on the bottom line, sees no future in the
research, though he later radically changes his stance
-- the film favors action over motivation. There are
clearly dangers in this testing, and when one of the
test subjects goes wild Jacobs shuts down the project
immediately and orders the simian subjects to be
euthanized. Will rescues a baby chimp, Caesar, and
takes him home, where Caesar and Charles immediately
bond. Caesar's rapid and spectacular development of
superior intelligence and desperation about Charles
leads Will to treat his father with the trial serum.
And it works -- for a while -- so spectacularly that
the next morning Charles is discovered playing a Bach
fugue on the piano.
Superior intelligence (and extraordinary dexterity and
climbing and jumping skills) aside, Caesar has his
mother's violent protective tendencies. So when
Charles suddenly relapses and does some car damage and
a nasty neighbor gets mean, Caesar counter attacks.
Animal Control comes and takes him away. This echoes
the trajectory of the Seventies chimp research
detailed in James Marsh's recent documentary Project
Nim, where a chimpanzee raised like a human child
becomes dangerous and is locked up with other chimps
-- which he has no experience of. Will tries to bribe
Landon (Brian Cox), the sleazy supervisor at the ape
house where Caesar's housed. Meanwhile Caesar has to
cope with the gratuitous cruelty of Landon's son Dodge
(Tom Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter).
Obviously this is a blue-ribbon cast, with the
charismatic Franco at the lead backed up by Freida
Pinto of Slumdog Millionaire as his sweet veterinarian
girlfriend Caroline. Too bad they aren't given much to
do that's beyond generic. Some have commented that the
motion-captured Andy Sarkis as the grown up Caesar has
a fuller range of emotional expressions than any of
the human cast. There are dozens of human characters
in the movie, but they're less memorable than the
individual apes, gorillas, and orangutans that
eventually are released and led into a revolt by the
ingenious Caesar. It's the rise of rage among these
escaped caged beasts that seems to draw on the
starting idea of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, of a
spreading rage virus spurred when experimental apes
escape from captivity. In Project Nim, Nim's
imprisonment with lab animals marks the low point of
his sad story.
Things deteriorate after this, though the CGI remains
impressive, and less emphatically ultra-violent than
the usual comic book blockbuster. It's just that as
the apes multiply and overrun San Francisco and engage
in a showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge, they become
simply a horde of extras, or, seen from above, a
little like swarming insects. Their goal is an ironic
bit of symbolic nature, the domesticated redwood
forest across the bridge known as Muir Woods. Where
they will go from there remains to e seen. Their
rampage has been impressive, but the threat they
represent at this point seems a bit exaggerated. Not
all the thinking behind this screenplay is ironclad.
The interest of the ideas engaged -- and the Planet of
the Apes series has always been thus stimulating -- is
once again the conflicting allegiances that this
prequel awakens in the viewer, who observes homo
sapiens being overrun, while sympathizing with the
revolt of the wronged caged creatures. There are also
other themes, sometimes simplistically enunciated, as
when one character tells Will that "maybe some things
are not meant to change" in answer to his search for a
genetic cure to senility. As in Project Nim it's also
suggested that to experiment with intelligent higher
apes is to play with fire. Once you've treated an
intelligent chimp like a human baby and let him run
free in your house, you can never put him back in a
cage. When he grows big and strong and dangerous,
you've created a monster. This is the kernel of
real-life truth the screenplay cleverly builds on.
Caesar's and Will's final farewell is a touching
little gesture of inter-species love and
understanding. But mostly the apes are angry and out
for blood and the finale, as is typical for the
franchise, is full of foreboding.
Rise of Planet of the Apes is exciting, but it's a
mixture of pluses and minuses. As too often in slickly
promoted Hollywood movies, the best version of it may
well be the trailer. I left the theater feeling hugely
disappointed, because the early sequences are so
suggestive of possibilities, while the latter scenes
are just conventional chases and battles. From the
point of view of what technology can do to make a
fantasy of apes in revolt come to life, the movie
stays dazzling to the final moment. The overbearing
musical score by Patrick Doyle is obtrusive from quite
early on and the booming and banging noises that
accompany any collective ape action are too loud to
let you think or feel: it's sonic Shock and Awe so
crude that it's obvious we're being treated as far
dumber than the apes. But Andy Sarkis' motion-capture
performance through his simian avatar is so
sympathetic, and all humans other than Will, Charles,
and Caroline so one-dimensionally unappealing, our
allegiances are skillfully manipulated so as to be
troubling to the end.