Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes 239
It's a hollywood blockbuster, so the plot is simple: James Franco is a scientist testing an Alzheimers cure that goes wrong. The test-chimps are all put down, but one was unexpectedly pregnant. Franco has to adopt the baby, whom he raises and teaches. He eventually uses his meds to cure his sick father, and Caesar is taken away to an animal sanctuary where exciting 2nd and 3rd act plot points lead to an action finale.
James Franco really seems to pick good movies to be in. From Freaks and Geeks on, he really seems to land good roles, and this movie was no exception. I've never had a problem buying him as a stoner or spoiled rich kid, but in this movie he gets to show emotion for his Alzheimer's stricken father, passion for his scientific work, and of course love for his ape "child" Caesar. The first half of the movie hangs on this relationship, and Franco holds up his end of the bargain.
Of course, the other side is the CGI rendered, Andy Serkis acted 'Caesar.' The ape was the unexpected child of a mother used to test Franco's Alzheimers cure, which goes horribly wrong and is cancelled. Caesar is a genius monkey who learns to communicate and solve puzzles far beyond a human child of the same age. It must kind of suck being Serkis: his work as Gollum and Kong has typecast him as the 'Performance Capture' poster child, but he does a great job. I buy the emotion in most of the scenes: it's only a few of the action shots where the weight felt wrong to me. For the film to work, Franco, Serkis, and the SFX had to all be pretty much perfect. And for my money, they were.
The rest of the film has some problems: The "Bad Guys" are so unbelievably "Bad" that it makes you want to wince. The zookeeper. The jerk neighbor. The bad boss. They are drawn with such thick black lines, I felt like we lose a lot of the potential for the story. The fact is that Franco is violating medical ethics, there is cruelty being done to animals, innocent people are hurt but because the "Bad Guys" are ludicrously bad, many of the hard issues are glossed over. Franco: Good. People who disagree with Franco: Bad.
As I said above, my fear for the movie was that it would simply be a Transformers style action film. Now, I like Transformers 3 just fine for what it is, but the majority of those movies are simply non-stop, boring action sequences. And I don't much care for that. I love action, but if that's your entire movie, it's pretty tough to carry 2 hours. Fortunately this movie is mostly about the development of Caesar: him struggling to figure out what he is, and finally learning to survive and escape imprisonment. These scenes are interesting and fun. So when we finally get to the dramatic finale atop the Golden Gate Bridge, it's nice to just have the big action release.
Plus Apes wreck stuff. It's pretty awesome.
Also, I don't recommend singing the Simpsons Planet of the Apes Musical during the closing credits. Your wife will get mad at you, even if it was the part you were born to play.
It was completely plausible. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the naysayers who haven't seen this film are complaining that they don't believe a handful of apes could take over the entire planet.
Well, they don't. Get over that. This is a prison breakout movie. They do eventually own the planet, through a twist that's telegraphed in advance and completely plausible. But the main action is a couple hundred apes against the San Francisco PD.
Just go see the movie. It's very, very good, completely plausible, with no plot holes. (Although as mentioned, some of the humans in it do act stupidly evil.) And Serkis deserves an Oscar nod for the role.
The plot and the Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
In the original "Planet of the Apes" movie, this kind of plot was chosen to show us humans, how we behave and how stupid and violent it is.
First, it pointed out that humans destroyed earth after all, because of the usual things: greed, stupidity and being power hungry morons. Second, it changed the perspective for humans. Now humans are the animals and the apes are those who control the world. Humans are mistreated and used for experiments without any doubt in the action. Just as we humans did and do. Third, it shows that the apes, who call themselves superior (being a little bit chauvinistic at this point), that they would not resolve their problems in violence. However, in the end they do. In that part it discusses the problem with unequal power inside a society can result in problems when not controlled properly.
The way to broach those issues were good and typical for the time the movie was made. All this World War III stuff can be seen in different movies, books and other creative work. However, nowadays such plot is more than lame. The idea of being taken over by apes is not very convincing. Even if apes are twice as smart as a human (which is not possible, due to energy constraints). We humans are 6 billion entities 1/12 has guns. On the other side, there are at top most a million apes (I doubt that there are still that many of them) without guns. And the very idea of fire weapons is, that physical power does now longer count. So the apes are largely outnumbered and outgunned.
But the top most thing is, our cultural context changed since 1963 (book)/1968 (movie) and it does not make sense to discuss these issues in a move in the same way. A much more convincing plot would be a world, were we eradicated almost all animals and un-diversified plant life in such a way that some simple deceases destroy all our crops and humans die out (almost) due to food shortage.
Such movies are however, difficult because the transition takes so long. You either use the Roland Emmerich approach and let happen a deep freeze in days instead of decades or you try to do a 12 Monkeys approach. YOu not necessarily need time travel, but it is a method to connect the move past and the move present.