Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Quick Impressions:
I thought this was the saddest summer blockbuster ever, but that’s probably because early on, the chimp Caesar started to remind me of my two-year-old daughter, and I was never able to shake the association. If I’d instead decided, Hmm. That chimp looks an awful lot like Gollum, I’m sure my overall sadness would have been reduced to a more reasonable level. (Neither my husband nor my stepson shared my crushing sense of sadness, so maybe it was just me.)
Still, Andy Serkis infused the chimp with such emotionally charged humanity that the movie worked. By the time the apes rise, you’re completely in their corner and hungry for the come-uppance of the despicable humans. A cautionary sci-fi tale with a decent amount of action, Rise of the Planet of the Apes delivered a product much better than you’d expect from a prequel released so late in the summer. After the movie, I told my mother, “That was the best Planet of the Apes movie I’ve seen.”
“Better than the original with Charlton Heston?” she asked.
Okay, so this is the best Planet of the Apes movie I’ve seen in the theater as a first-run feature. Basically, what I’m saying is, it’s in an entirely different league than the pretty awful but unfortunately not completely forgettable (no matter how hard you try), Tim Burton remake starring Mark Wahlberg. Comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes is much more difficult because that movie came out forty-three years ago when special effects and acting styles were different. (Actually, though, James Franco’s acting style is surprisingly similar to Charlton Heston’s—they both stand there and say their lines, Franco as underwhelmed as Heston is overwhelming. Try as you might, you never really forget that they are, in fact, James Franco and Charlton Heston respectively—and Franco is as bummed about that as Heston is elated.)
The Good and The Very Good:
This is definitely the best sci-fi movie I’ve seen this summer, though I’m not sure I’ve seen any others. But like almost all true science fiction, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has a very grim, cautionary tone that sometimes becomes truly ominous.
In general, the performances are good. James Franco much of the time seems depressed, driven, desperate, tortured (sort of like when he hosted the Oscars, except in Apes he’s a bit less detached). As portrayed by Franco, Will Rodman remains a likeable character even when we realize that he’s acting without considering the possible consequences, almost certain to be devastating on many levels.
At heart, he’s interested in manipulating chemical bonds to preserve the few emotional ones in his world. Because the movie begins by moving quickly through time, Will’s romance with Freida Pinto’s Caroline never feels quite as real as the bond he shares with his father Charles (played by John Lithgow), but, of course, maybe it’s not quite as strong. Certainly the film focuses most on the bond between parent and child.
To me, there was a certain sadness at the heart of the film. A scientist working for a businessman, Will remained compassionate and caring. He seemed to love Caesar just as he would have loved a biological son, but when your son is a chimpanzee with artificially enhanced intelligence and natural confusion about his own identity and place in the world, that can’t end well. And even if Will can use innovative research to develop an effective cure for Alzheimer’s, he can’t make his father live forever. In full possession of his faculties or not, Charles is going to die eventually. Charles understands this. Caroline, too, understands that there are certain things beyond our control. (She keeps saying so.) But by the time Will begins to understand, it’s already too late.
The movie’s last act is quite uplifting and makes you forget some of these maudlin themes. Caesar and the other apes are quite heroic, and the people repressing them are barbaric and easy to root against. Still (I guess I’m just in a glass-half-empty mood this weekend), it’s kind of hard to forget that the Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes hand-in-hand with the fall of the human race. (And just like the apes are primed for an uprising, the humans seem to deserve their downfall.)
Best Action Sequence:
There’s really only one action sequence, so by default, it’s the best. (I suppose it does have several components), but there’s little action in the movie until nearly the end, and once the action starts, it doesn’t let up until just before the credits roll.
Anyway, the action sequence that leaves an impression is the stand-off on the Golden Gate Bridge. Stuff blows up. Blood, fur, and bullets fly. Even the fog gets in on the action. (Of course, like all forces of nature and the audience, it’s on the apes’ side. We’ve all pretty much given up on the humans by this point.) It’s pretty cool to watch, particularly the gorilla’s heroic sacrifice.
Best Joke:
This movie has very little humor, but some of the (numerous) references to past Planet of the Apes films might make you smile.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene in the movie was when Caesar defended Charles (Will’s father) to his own peril. Andy Serkis’s portrayal of Caesar is so compelling. In his eyes, you see such a range of intense yet relatable emotions, and in that particular scene, you see the same confusion, rage, fear, and love in the eyes of John Lithgow’s Charles. When the two cling to each other, each frightened and confused but both comforting and taking comfort from the other, it’s hard not to cry. This may sound cliché, but love is the most precious thing in this life, and the world is so full of hatred. I felt so sad for them, two souls who didn’t belong anywhere anymore because other people pointedly refused to understand them on their own terms and make a place for them.
Best Surprise:
I really liked that orangutan. (When you watch the movie, you’ll know the one I mean.) When Caesar is first imprisoned in the animal sanctuary, he seems completely friendless—either maliciously mistreated or completely misunderstood by everyone there. So that orangutan’s overtures were quite a pleasant surprise to me.
Best Scene Visually:
The movie shows us a number of scenic vistas, but I personally liked the moment when Brian Cox’s John Landon accidentally witnesses the apes rehearsing their battle plan. When all the apes are assembled, they’re a visually impressive force.
The Negatives: [Some Light Spoilers]
This movie presents a very skewed view of humanity and prevents us from meeting many nice humans. The family is safe and good, but anyone outside the family is an evil, selfish, mindless, combative creep—or an orangutan.
Most noticeably, Will’s next door neighbor (played by David Hewlett) was over-the-top in his aggressive misanthropy (to say nothing of his misapethropy). None of his actions made any sense. I mean, naturally, fathers want to keep their children away from strange animals, but who among us when confronted by a chimp dressed in clothes admiring a bicycle would really think the logical way to proceed was to attempt to bash said chimp to death with a baseball bat? Was Caesar wearing gang colors I didn’t notice? Was the neighbor in a rival gang? If not, the guy’s behavior was beyond reactionary and made no sense.
And he didn’t treat human beings any better. If you saw the elderly man who had lived next door to you for many years attempting to drive your car while looking haphazardly dressed and generally confused, would you threaten him within an inch of his life, then proceed to brutalize and terrorize him while he continued to seem confused and frightened?
And why on earth would you go yell at someone just for knocking on your neighbor’s door (standing so threateningly close that he can sneeze contaminated blood all over you)?
People can be jerks. But this guy was too much! Within one convenient character, he housed all of the assorted vices of humankind. Why didn’t Will move away or beat the guy to death with a baseball bat? (Okay, I know it’s not that simple, but the character was so persistently and perplexingly nasty!) I felt like all of humanity was doomed to be dominated by a race of super-intelligent apes just because that one guy was such a big jerk. I know that neighbors can be a pain, but I wish the movie had shown other jerks. Normally, I’m all for economy of characters, but just about every (non-lab-related) atrocity in the movie was committed by this one guy.
Now that I’ve said that, I have to admit that in fairness, there were three rotten guys—the guy who lived next door, the son of the guy who owned the primate sanctuary, and the guy who ran the lab and answered to the stock holders. Everyone Will came into contact with outside of his house was either some horrible, compassionless maniac, a kind scientist with his brains running out of his nose, or Freida Pinto.
Were all the people on earth that awful, or just the people in San Francisco, or just the people who happened to interact with Will and Caesar? Something felt kind of forced about all the negativity and nastiness, especially because so few rotten people so quickly destroyed the world as we know it. The world of Rise of the Planet of the Apes seems so small and so populated by jerks. I realize that something has to make the audience disoriented enough to begin rooting for the apes, but this situation felt contrived to me.
I found Will’s boss’s sudden determination to continue testing the drug without learning more about the potential side effects to humans particularly bizarre given the PR disaster that happened at the beginning of the movie and the guy’s horror of making a bad impression on the board.
In order to take over the world (or even to move in that direction), the apes certainly needed a lot of help, and the humans in this movie were more than happy to give it to them.
The Performances:
I’ve already mentioned that James Franco played the human lead very capably. (He was brooding, to say the least, but the movie seemed to encourage that, so I’ll forgive him.)
John Lithgow was magnificent as his father Charles, a wonderful, nurturing, gifted man suffering increasingly from Alzheimer’s disease. Why must Charles suffer when so many jerks run around taking their good health for granted? (Don’t fret. They’ll all be sneezing their melted brains out sooner than they know.)
So lovely in Slumdog Millionaire, Freida Pinto didn’t have a lot to do as Caroline Aranha, but she provided a lot of wisdom and compassion, and pretty much the only proof that Will and his father were not the only kind-hearted people left on earth. I was glad to see her in a summer blockbuster. Her character was much more centered than anyone else in the movie. And was she, in fact, the only female human? (I guess there was the screaming neighbor girl and the lady with the dog, but these ladies really didn’t linger. There were other girls, but they didn’t really have lines.)
Brian Cox is always good, and he was good as John Landon, the somewhat sinister and definitely corrupt fellow in charge of the primate sanctuary. He really didn’t have a lot to do, though.
It was nice to see Tom Felton, playing Landon’s son Dodge, in a role outside Harry Potter, though I was kind of sad that he turned out to be a nasty, despicable, cowardly bully, quite similar in character (or at least in character flaws) to Draco Malfoy. Still, Felton gave a strong performance and had the honor of uttering the movie’s most unforgettable (if only because it’s recycled) line.
I thought David Oyewolo was quite captivating as Steven Jacobs, and Tyler Labine was both likeable and pitiable as the ill-fated Franklin.
Andy Serkis, of course, was the real star of the show. He pretty much carried the movie. Without his intense, emotionally evocative performance, at any rate, I don’t think the film would have worked as well as it did. He was beyond magnificent, just as good, if not better, as he was as the more tortured and less likeable Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Will he ever get the recognition he deserves for incredible performances like these? I hope so.
Overall:
Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a good movie, probably one of the most solid of the summer. I wish the apes had risen a little sooner because I thought Caesar made a compelling hero, attractive in his triumph. Cheering for the well led apes provides a sense of satisfaction that almost makes you forget that you’ve spent so much of the movie weeping for the misguided humans. It is a good movie, though, well executed and entertaining.