Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’ll refer to this one as Planet of the Apes here, since the full title is just way too long. I thought this was going to be a remake of the Charleton Heston movie, but it’s done as a prequel to that one. I’ve waited this long to see it because:
- It’s based on an old movie, making it un-original
- It’s heavily CGI, which is usually at the cost of the story
Based on recommendations (thanks Chrissie!), I went to see it and was wonderfully surprised at how little the CGI got in the way, and what a good story it was.
How we created smart apes and dumb humans was outlined in the original movie. The writer here threw that out and created a new story to take us from the world we know to the world Heston found. In this new version, some chimpanzees are taken to a research lab where an experimental Alzheimer’s drug is being developed. This drug permits the brain tissue to regenerate, hopefully repairing the damage caused by the disease. The testing of the latest compound shows that not only does it repair damage, it accelerates mental development. I.e., the chimps get smarter.
When one of the experimental subjects turns violent, the project is cancelled. But one of the apes is brought home with the main researcher. Fast forward, and this ape is clearly very intelligent, and growing more so as time goes on. When he acts to defend one of the residents, the authorities have him put in an animal sanctuary.
The movie is the journey of this special ape, named Caesar, and how he spreads the intelligence to other apes (plus a Gorilla and some Ourangs), becoming the leader of a new race of sapient beings on Earth.
I don’t want to put the whole plot here, since it does work out in a fairly linear fashion. Why take away the “ride” by describing it here? This is one of the reasons the movie didn’t make a 3 star rating for me; you may not have known what was coming, but nothing really surprised you.
You’ll note I haven’t said anything, really, about the CGI. All the apes and other hominids (less the humans) were CGI creations. I don’t have much to say about the work, because the movie wasn’t about the CGI, it was about the story of Caesar. This alone separates it from the horrible Avatar, which had nothing to say except, “look what we can do with a computer”.
I think some of the opening scenes were a mix of real chimps and CGI chimps; the effects were so good I couldn’t tell for sure. There were a couple of places where the physics of the creatures was off, but only a couple and nothing jarring. All honor to the production folks for putting story at the top of their list, and not allowing the effects to intrude.
Caesar starts out as a vulnerable little baby. Almost all the humans are portrayed as evil and/or sadistic, who are only interested in abusing the apes. I don’t respond well to the “mad scientist” view of things so common in Hollywood “Sci-Fi”. If they had stuck to people trying to cure Altzheimer’s and allowed their pursuit of that to override their better instincts, if they had allowed the characters to cross that moral line step by step, it would have that ring of truth: no real villans ever think they’re evil. They always think they are doing the Right Thing, and become blind to the harm they do in pursuit of it.
Part way through the story, Caesar changes. The person he becomes is not nice. I think I’m supposed to overlook his destructive ways because he was abused. But I just could not rally behind his search for revenge on all humans for the actions of two specific people. He does stop the other apes from killing at times. But while he doesn’t seem ready to kill personally, he was willing to step aside and let others kill humans for him. I did not like this side of him, so in the last half of the movie there were really no “good guys” to root for.
Good acting by James Franco, and while it’s good to see Tom Felton (“Draco Malfoy”) moving beyond Harry Potter, he still plays an insufferable prat. He needs a better agent, who can get him roles other than “resident asshole”. And Freida Pinto (_Slumdog Millionare_) does a good job with the part she was handed, but I have the impression that she has more to offer than was called for in this script.
Overall, it’s a good movie. The lack of surprises and any good guys make this less than a three star effort.
My rating: 2.75 stars out of 4