RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Better take the ferry today

Is this the best Planet Of The Apes movie yet?  I'm not really qualified to say.  I've seen the original (and re-seen it recently), I think I've seen the first two or three original sequels on the SciFi channel years back, and I saw the lackluster Tim Burton remake from a decade ago.  But now I've seen this one too, and its easily better than all those.  The 1968 original sadly did not hold up for me upon repeat viewing; sure, its fun to watch Charlton Heston with his feet up on the dash of a spaceship smoking a cigar, and the first twenty minutes or so after the crash is sorta neat, but once they find the ape civilization, its just an hour and a half of farting around until the justifiably legendary ending.  This film succeeds by gaining your sympathy for the apes and their uprising.  Make no mistake, the people are window dressing; this is an ape movie.  The first starring role for a totally CG character, and it won't give you painful Jar-Jar flashbacks of any kind.  His name is Caesar and this is his planet.  Hail Caesar!

Little known fact:  The makeup effects in the original Planet Of The Apes movie are not very good.  Seriously, you can go back and watch it to check if you want, but I'd like to think I've saved you the trouble.  The few main character apes look decent, if not almost completely swaddled in clothing, but everybody in the background looks like some bum in a Halloween mask.  1968 was the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, but supposedly the old fogies who vote for the Oscars were so fooled by the movie magic onscreen that they thought that film used well-trained animals instead of well-trained gymnasts inside well-tailored costumes, so instead they gave the Oscar to the movie where everybody looks like crap except Charlton Heston.

Enough about those effects, lets talk about these effects.  There is so much CGI in this film that it runs the gamut from F work to solid A + stuff.  Thanks to Weta Digital (responsible for the award-winning effects of King Kong, District 9, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and many more) the vast overwhelming majority of the scenes feature exquisite effects work.  Its pretty astonishing to think that there were absolutely no apes, gorillas, orangutans, monkeys or chimps of any kind on set. They have been done a disservice by including so many of the over-ambitious and therefore less refined scenes in the trailer for the film, because there are countless other scenes that demonstrate jaw-dropping technical prowess.  Even the opening scene, featuring chimps captured in the wild, is instantly impressive, much more so than anything I saw featured in the advertisements for the film.  This film even manages to turn a helicopter crash, something so routine for Hollywood that I think Broken Arrow has five of them, and turn it into a hair-raising set-piece despite not involving the main characters and despite having the copter crash more realistically, and less ball-of-fire then you would expect.

Andy Serkis has played Gollum, King Kong, and now a chimp named Caesar.  You can see him as a real person playing David Bowie's assistant in The Prestige but he seems well suited to delivering these types of computer-enhanced performances so why mess with a good thing?  Caesar really is the star of the show, and we follow him from infancy, as he is spirited away from a lab and saved from execution (made me think of Moses), up to his rebellious teenage years, when he gets in a fight with the neighborhood bully and bites off a small piece of him, and finally to his time as the chosen one, the ape-savior.  I was honestly worried about Caesar's well-being near the end of the film, after having followed him so far, and that's pretty impressive considering how few lines he gets.  Like any good rebel leader, Caesar eventually gets his own crew of trusted lieutenants, like another chimp with a much bigger chip on his shoulder and a freakishly scarred face to match, a fierce but loyal gorilla enforcer with no fear, and a wise orangutan who stills knows some of the tricks he learned from the circus that he escaped.

There are some mostly hairless mammals on display here as well.  James Franco plays a brilliant scientist and I think his monotone actually makes him more believable than the typical Hollywood scientist, who is either descended from Dr Frankenstein or The Nutty Professor.  Franco devotes himself to cutting-edge research after Alzheimer's makes it personal by coming after his dad John Lithgow, who once met Sasquatch. Tyler Labine is an incompetent lab assistant who at least manages to save Caesar before corporate fatcat David Oyelowo orders all the chimps killed after one of them escapes and trashes the entire building.  Frieda Pinto, the woman so beautiful that all of India conspired to keep her away from the titular Slumdog Millionaire, is a veterinarian that Caesar seems to have the hots for even though he makes Franco ask her out.  Tom Felton just finished playing the Aryan wunderkind of the wizarding world, Draco Malfoy, in the Harry Potter series, and here he plays a casually cruel warden at a chimp preserve, run by his father, the criminally underused Brian Needmore Cox.

Although Vancouver doubles for San Francisco, there is some nice local color, like recreated trolley cars, FasTrak sensors on dashboards, and proper MOMA banners visible on the light posts as the chimps swing to and fro, not to mention the towering Victorian home that Franco lives in.  Franco tests some super brain juice on Caesar, and for a while, Franco has his hot vet girlfriend, his getting-smarter-again dad, and his ultra-smart chimp son all living together under one roof together, and life seems pretty good.  It doesn't last.  Once Caesar is in the preserve, Franco and company start doubling down on their super brain juice research, and accidentally end up with two strains that don't work properly: one that makes apes super smart, and one that slowly melts your brain out your nose.  I sure hope both those don't get loose at the same time.

Despite an endorsement from PETA, mostly because the production didn't use any real animals, this film never has any sort of conventional eco-terrorism on its mind and I think it's fair to say that its politics still remain fairly pro-human.  When Caesar attacks someone, Franco complies with the court order and hands the animal over to the chimp preserve, vowing to appeal the decision and fight the system within the system.  Likewise, early on in the film when an escaped chimp starts destroying a whole building and threatening people, we don't have any sort of moment excoriating the security guard who finally does what any security guard would/should have done within the first five seconds.

Very early on, we get accurate warnings from most characters about how incredibly dangerous chimps are.  Seriously, they will rip your face and genitals off at the drop of a hat.  The discovery channel once told me that in the wild gorillas will leave areas once the chimps move in, because they know what murderous assholes they are and would rather find somewhere else to live instead of dealing with them.  After seeing the previews, I was very curious how the apes would take over San Francisco, but it turns out they are just rampaging through it on their way from San Bruno to Muir Woods, taking pit-stops to free other apes from research labs and the infamously shitty zoo, so I guess they have more long terms plans for the city.

Sometimes 'science-fiction' just seems to mean an action movie with futuristic production design, but this film falls squarely in the tradition of science-fiction that concerns itself with questions first, and with the robots/aliens/monkeys/what-have-you second.  Sophomore director Rupert Wyatt delivers a film that is head and shoulders above the other summer blockbusters I've seen, utilizing CGI for storytelling purposes instead of splashy spectacle, cleverly referencing its predecessors with subtle in-jokes, and telling a compelling and unique story of someone coming to terms with their destiny and leading their people to freedom; yeah, he's a chimp, but its a good movie for humans.