By Tanner McCullough
I was leery when another Planet of the Apes movie was announced. After the debacle that was Tim Burton’s remake, a large part of me wanted filmmakers and the major studios to leave the franchise alone. Boy, am I glad to be wrong. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a great movie for fans of the franchise. Though for the most part the questions it answers were fine left unanswered, it is great to watch the first steps of our ape overlords.
Will (James Franco) is a scientist working hard on a cure for alzheimers so that he can cure his father (John Lithgow). One of Will’s chimps, Bright Eyes, demonstrates remarkable cognitive ability. Soon though, Bright Eyes freaks out, Will’s research is scrapped by the higher ups, and the scientists are ordered to put down the remaining chimps. During this process, Bright Eyes’ baby is discovered. Unwilling to put it down, he takes the baby home to keep his sick dad company. Soon Will has named the chimp Caesar, and the three of them begin to form a bizarre family unit.
We watch as Caesar grows up and learns about the hard world around him. Some of the best moments occur early in the film, when Caesar is still innocent. When Caesar discovers the redwoods and rips around them with joy, it’s hard not to feel happy for him. His ingenious method of getting cookies from the cookie jar is also fun to watch.
All does not go well forever. Caesar is eventually forced into an ape sanctuary, where all the animals are abused. A significant portion of the movie takes place in these cages. While it’s good for establishing the ape characters, I felt that it went on longer than it needed to. The titular rise of the apes only takes up about twenty minutes of a nearly two hour long movie. In other words, though this is a great movie, don’t go into it expecting a lot of action.
The most crucial part of this movie was the CGI. Generally I find these effects to be somewhere between distracting and obnoxious, but this film does amazing things with the technology. It is important for the audience to relate to Caesar, and the filmmakers succeeded in giving him a realistic means of emoting. Because of this we feel for Caesar, and even cheer him on as he destroys San Francisco.
Other than the overlong jail scene, there were very few flaws with the overall movie. The movie tries to establish itself in the overall universe (we see news reports about Charlton Heston’s ship, for example), but sometimes these homages are distracting. In the middle of a crucial scene, one character says, “get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape”, which totally ruins the tension of the overall scene. These are slight issues though, and are not nearly enough to detract from a surprisingly cerebral summer movie.
4.5 out of 5 stars
© Tanner McCullough, 2011
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