Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes



The Good: Entertaining from start to finish, amazing special effects, interesting character development (of the apes)
The Bad: Fairly cliche-ish human characters, predicable

The Review
I had been excited about this movie since I first learned of it several months ago. I've seen all of the Planet of the Apes movies and think the original is the only really good one of the bunch. And some, if not most, of the sequels or remakes are quite bad. The latest remake, ten years ago, of the original Planet of the Apes, starring Mark Wahlberg, was fair. The Wahlberg version just made the original movie modern but didn't add anything to the mix.

This version of the ape movies is called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and you need not know anything about the previous movies to watch this film. It's a stand alone film and is only connected to the other movies through some of the lines the characters deliver from previous movies. Even if you've seen some of the other movies most of these lines will go unnoticed and aren't crucial to the plot. The obligatory "take your damn paws off of me" line is thrown in and there is one scene in the movie where one of the characters is watching the original Planet of the Apes, these are the only two references that will probably be noticed by the non-hardcore viewers of the series.

The star of the film is the special effects. What makes them so good is you don't really notice you are watching special effects, everything just looks natural. There are no awkward moments where you notice the human actor is talking to a blue screen, the computer generated imagery (CGI) is top notch, and the landscape of San Francisco, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Giant Redwoods, is beautiful (I'm assuming a lot of the scenery shots were computer generated as well, it's just not distinguishable between real and CGI in this movie).

The weakest part of the movie is the human characters. The acting is fine, even good when John Lithgow is on the screen playing the Alzheimer's stricken father of James Franco, but the roles the actors were asked to play bring nothing to the table. All of the typical characters you would expect to find are in the movie: the greedy boss, the people that work with animals and treat them good, the people that work with animals and treat them bad, the grumpy neighbor that gets into your business and makes life difficult, and the levelheaded girlfriend that keeps the star (at least the human star) of the movie from acting too rash at any given moment. The human element of the movie is passable and doesn't sink the ship, it wasn't bad acting on the part of the actors, just bland and typical roles they had to play.

While there is no character development in the human roles, there is quite a bit of character development in the primate roles. We are introduced to Caesar, a chimpanzee, at his birth and follow him for several years into his early adulthood. Franco's character, Will Rodman, has spent many years working on a cure for Alzheimer's and tests his drugs on captured chimpanzees while working for a large corporation that is motivated by profit. When things go wrong at the facility the chimpanzees have to be put down and Franco doesn't have the heart to kill the newborn Caesar. He ends up taking him home with the intent of finding him shelter at a different cite. When Franco discovers Caesar has been exposed to the latest strand of the drug for the cure to Alzheimer's he notices Caesar has extraordinary learning capabilities. Franco decides to keep Caesar at his home to live with him and treats him like a son.



Everything about Caesar is likeable and adorable when he lives at Franco's house. And even when things change and Caesar grows older and is in a different environment with his peers and begins to become his own "person", you still sympathize with his plight. Character development is a hard task in any movie but throw in the wrench of no spoken dialogue and it would seem a nearly impossible feat. However, it is achieved remarkably well in Rise. Watching Caesar grow, learn about himself, and influence and find his role in the primate kingdom is fascinating. He builds relationships with other primates and struggles to become the alpha male in the tribe. It's an interesting journey to watch and all the while not one word of dialogue is uttered.

One of the most intriguing elements of the movie to me was the fact that I spent so much time pulling for the primates in the first half of the story it became difficult to know who I was rooting for when the apes eventually made their rise. To further complicate it, even though the apes could and did kill people, Caesar kept them in check and limited the killing to necessity and to only those deserving. Yet, the humans weren't all that bad either and you could envision needing to get this situation (organized apes running through the city and shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge) under control.

From reading other reviews the biggest knock on the movie was the ending. Most suggested it left things wide open for a sequel and wasn't fulfilling. I completely disagree. No doubt, it did leave things open for more ape movies, but it resolves this situation quite well. And if no other future movies were made you certainly are able to connect the dots and know the ultimate outcome of this specific situation.

All in all, I recommend the movie. The bad things about it aren't that bad and don't take away from many of the good things. It would be foolish to expect anything to be better than the original Planet of the Apes, it was a classic. However, this is definitely the second best movie in the franchise and head and shoulders above all the others. If nothing else, it was entertaining from start to finish and that's not the norm for most movies.