Review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) by Kenneth E — 14 Sep 2014

Why does every "reboot" have to be dark and gritty as if directed by Christopher Nolan? Fans of the original 1968 "Planet of the Ape" flick, beware; this is not the sci-fi classic you know and cherish. It seems like filmmakers' primary intent was to add a layers of dark broodiness and to showcase the advancements in eye-movement-simulating performance capture. Those CG apes were quite stunning... 60% of the time. But once they started crashing through windows, falling 300 feet onto solid concrete and broken glass shards unhurt and unscathed, I lost all interest in the reality of this stretched and outlandish storyline. While chimps, orangutans, and gorillas are incredibly strong and scary beasts by nature, they are not indestructible terminators that can take down armed resistance of humans equipped with guns and armored vehicles. The androids in "I Robot," (which this film tried hard to imitate in more than a few scenes,) could get away with near-superhero strength only because they were metallic, but apes should never have had the strength to succeed in their plot....which leads me to another thing which puzzled me about this film:

Caesar's plot.

We as audiences understand the bitterness Andy Serkis' Caesar felt when abandoned by his father figure James Franco, how he felt moral wrong by being leashed like a common pet, and how his freedom was never fulfilled under human control. My big question is this: what was the point of this big all-out assault on the human race??? Killing off Tom Felton (who, by the way, still acted as if he hadn't left the Harry Potter set,) was understandable, but there was no reason to cause mayhem to the entire city of San Francisco. If those laboratory drugs within Caesar's mind and genetic makeup were really "intelligence-enhancing" drugs, where is the intelligence in massive, senseless warfare? Perhaps the chimps had read a book by Donald Rumsfeld before setting off on their crusade of mayhem and dominance. For a being disgusted by human frailties, Caesar duplicated the worst of humankind, making him the biggest fool in the entire film.

On a positive note, the performance capture work simulating Caesar and the other apes was convincing a good 60% of the time, particularly in scenes when the apes were confined in a prison-like facility and they interacted in wordless conversations. My favorite sequences were those where NO humans appeared at all, and the apes communicated through gestures, grunts, and groans. While many people criticized the film for its usage of subtitles in one or two scenes, I found this to be creepy and satisfying, and it allowed us to get into the heads of our hominid protagonists. Another thing worth mentioning is the plot twist of the virus that killed humans; a virus is the most effective way for apes to kill off the human species, and the end credits showing a simplistic world map and ominous red lines crisscrossing the globe in menacing expansion, was an elegant and simple way to say something "big" in a short amount of time without having to launch into Lord-of-the-Rings monologues about how "the world is in darkness, and our race is in trouble, blah, blah, blah...".

All in all, the positive is overshadowed by the negative in this film for reasons already described. If you are interested in films that spend an awful long time explaining how things came to be and then abruptly ending when the pieces are set in place, than this film is for you.

For me, however, I'll stick with Roddy McDowell in a plastic monkey mask.