Starting from the Beginning - Rise of the Planet of the Apes review

Posted @ Feb. 21 2012 08:25AM by Shawn - arts-entertainment

Growing up as a child of the 80s, I was a fan of various movies and cartoons. Star Wars, Superman, He-Man, you name it I probably had some passing interest. One that slipped through the cracks was the original Planet of the Apes movie series, though. I had the slightest of hints at the mythology, something involving Charlton Heston yelling at ape men, apes riding around on horseback, and humans being slaves while apes ruled. Beyond that, I didn't have much reference (although thinking about it that's not a bad start). So I imagine I was ideal in sitting down to watch how all the movies from the 70s actually began.

When I think of the original movies the thoughts that usually came to mind were the apes reminded me of the people on the Twilight Zone episode where the woman thought she was ugly and deformed but it turned out she was beautiful and everyone else looked deformed compared to her. I also thought that the planet reminded me of 50% of the places the old Star Trek show would beam down to on a mission (desert sets, lots of rocks, etc.). It wasn't an idea that ever drew me in. So imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes and actually was on the edge of my seat through the entire movie.

The premise of the movie is pretty simple. A scientist, Will Rodman (James Franco), at a biotechnology company is trying to create a drug to cure Alzheimer's disease. One of the biggest reasons for him to create this cure is because his father, Charles (John Lithgow), suffers from the horrible disease. The company uses chimps to test the drugs on and it turns out the drugs give the chimps human intelligence. When Will's best test subject goes on a rampage the day he's meeting with the board of his company to progress his testing to humans, the chimp, sadly, has to be put down. Only after the rampage, and putting down the rest of the chimps for fear that the drug might make the rest of them go into a frenzy as well, do the scientists discover that the chimp went on the rampage to protect her baby. Considered to be a short-term solution, Will rescues the baby and takes him home where his father names the baby chimp Caesar. Like all stories where an animal is rescued and the rescuer sees it as a short-term solution, Caesar becomes a member of the family, staying with Will and his father for years.

Maybe it's the fact that I lost my father last January to dementia, maybe it's the fact that when my fiancé moved in with me she brought along her cat that ended up adopting me into her family, but this movie was like a double dose of things that would invest me in it above and beyond where I would have been not long ago. The story of Will trying to help his father become normal again was just as interesting as the story of Caesar and his incredible development. It was probably wish fulfillment on my part, but the idea of being able to reverse a disease like Alzheimer's is something that I personally hope to see in my lifetime.

Putting that story point aside, let's take a moment to give credit where credit is due: to Andy Serkis and the digital effects crew who brought Caesar to life. And I do mean life. There's a term called the uncanny valley, a term used when something looks lifelike to the point where you don't have that constant, nagging feeling that a computer generated it. It looks like there's soul to the animation. One of the best examples of this is Avatar. If you want to see a version where it's not quite right look at Jeff Bridges as Clu in Tron Legacy where you can tell it's not a young Jeff Bridges. There's something off but you can't figure out what. In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar and all of the apes in the movie just look and feel like the real deal even though they were brought to life through motion capture work, computer rendering and live action actors creating performances that are effective and engaging. The work put into Caesar to sell you on his emotions, his processing thoughts, his adventurousness, it's all there in the eyes which reminded me of how effective animals can be at letting you in on their own personalities. Serkis's performance is the heart and soul of Caesar, though. Without Serkis giving Caesar that spark, that soul that draws you in to care about him so much, Caesar would just be a very nice visual. While Serkis's work in the Lord of the Rings movies as Gollum and in Peter Jackson's reimagining of King Kong were definitely noteworthy and impressive, Caesar is the role that brought Serkis's motion capture acting work to a whole new level. An innovator in the field of motion capture acting, Serkis is proving with each new role that there's so much more left to be discovered in this new way of creating characters to capture our hearts and minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is one of the rare cases where a prequel can capture or recapture an audience who is either newly introduced into a franchise or diehards who have invested themselves in the franchise since the beginning. There's plenty of nods to Planet of the Apes mythology, some so esoteric that you have to be a huge, rabid fan of the originals to even understand their nods. One, for instance, is the name of the drug that Will is creating. Apparently the name has to do with the running time of the original Planet of the Apes movie. But for those, like me, who are newbies to the universe of Planet of the Apes, there's a lot to love about Rise of the Planet of the Apes. There's moments that nod to what I knew of the franchise like the apes riding on horses during the giant stand off between the apes and the police on the San Francisco Bridge. There's a reference to Charlton Heston's "get your filthy paws off me you damn dirty ape!" line. There's even the shocking and amazing moment when the first of the apes finally has enough and says "NO!" as their first word to a human. It's all enough that even if you never followed the series previously, it will grab you and only entice you to get deeper into the movie. Seeing the pieces fall into place with the Alzheimer drug turning the apes into intelligent, human-like characters while you have the beginnings of why the planet will be controlled by apes, it's an interesting and thought provoking concept to think of what they might be able to do in future movies.