Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/6/11
Say
what you will about some of their wilder excesses, but there’s never been
a gutsier franchise than the one that began with 1968’s Planet of the
Apes. From the stunning reveal that the title planet was in fact
Earth, complete with gloriously buried Statue of Liberty, through those
underground mutants with their Holy Bomb, the wonderfully nuts sequel that
destroys said planet at the hands of the original’s own dying star, time
travel back to have the refugees of the planet of the apes become the creators
of it, and an outrageous ape uprising, the first four POTA movies
are nothing if not an exercise in taking risks and changing things up.
How tragic, then to see an Apes reboot done in 2001 that took virtually
no risks (yeah, the Charlton Heston cameo was priceless, but even the kicky
tag with Mark Wahlberg returning to Earth to find Aperaham Lincoln waiting
in Washington DC felt more calculated than gutsy) and sought to use the
Ape name for purely commercial purposes. One of the top-grossing
would-be franchise starters nobody ever gave a moment’s thought to sequeling,
Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes took a decade to get washed out
of our collective consciousness and now 20th Century Fox goes back to the
well with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an intriguing reimagining
of the last good movie in the original Apes series (that’s Conquest
of the Planet of the Apes for those of you scoring at home).
The first Apes movie to use CGI effects rather than the classic
makeup, it benefits from a superb performance by the master of motion capture
acting, Andy Serkis, and a script that lays out a far more convincing Apes
origin story than its predecessor. Director Rupert Wyatt has a good
understanding of just how scary wild animals can be, and the production
is skillfully mounted across the board. I’d have liked the human
characters to be as interesting as their simian counterparts, but Rise
manages to be a middle-of-the-pack entry in the Apes saga, which
is none too shabby.
Desperate
for a cure for his father Charles (John Lithgow), who suffers from Alzheimer’s,
researcher Will Rodman (James Franco) takes risky shortcuts while testing
a drug that should allow the brain to repair itself on primates.
It seems to be a success, and just as corporate bigwig Jacobs (David Oyelowo)
has gathered the board to see the one chimp it’s worked on, that monkey
goes wild, assuring that the project will be buried. But as all the
apes are put down, a shocking bit of news emerges: that rampaging
chimp had just given birth and was only trying to protect the baby.
Will takes the little guy, who he names Caesar (Andy Serkis under motion
capture effects), in and makes the decision to slip Charles the drug.
It works miraculously, and the two of them enjoy raising Caesar together
as the chimp shows the effects of the drug passed down from his mother:
it continues to repair and improve his brain, allowing for cognitive skills
far beyond a normal monkey. Locked away from people outside the Rodman
household, which grows to include Will’s veterinarian girlfriend Caroline
(Frieda Pinto), Caesar grows lonely and restless, and as he matures into
a full-grown chimp, his patience with being kept on a leash and generally
being a third-class citizen wears thin. As Charles’ system produces
antibodies that fight off the cure that functions in part as a virus, his
Alzheimer’s returns, and Caesar gets in trouble defending him from being
beaten up by an unruly neighbor (David Hewlett). That leads to the
chimp being locked away in the corrupt monkey warehousing facility run
by John Landon (Brian Cox) and his cruel son Dodge (Tom Felton).
At first treated badly by the wild apes there, Caesar bonds with Maurice
(Karin Konoval), a former circus orangutan who knows sign language.
More and more frantic to save his father, Will develops a new airborne
variation on his formula which has unintended side effects on humans, and
allows Caesar to hatch a plan to level the playing field between humans
and the Apes.
Wyatt
and his writers take advantage of the transition from the makeup effects
that shocked 1968 audiences but we now take for granted to a new set of
CGI apes to recapture the terror of a damn dirty ape not just being able
to break your spine but look you intelligently in the eye while he does
it. Much of the third act’s sound and fury is predicated on the fear
of having to engage a monkey in hand-to-hand combat or have it pin you
down and roar in your face. If you’re not at least respectfully afraid
of apes, you just not very smart, and the 2011 simians are as brutally
powerful as they are able to think, plan and hate. And the creature
designers came up with a tremendous design for Koba (motion captured by
stuntman Christopher Gordon), a veteran lab monkey who becomes a hideous
one-eyed enforcer in Caesar’s army.
While
we spent years trapped in motion capture’s Uncanny Valley while misguided
filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis fixated on everything we DIDN’T want to
see done with the technology, Avatar was that
great leap forward technologically and in terms of storytelling that finally
allows an achievement like Apes. Which is not to say the uprising
simians never look like cartoon characters or have a stray unnatural movement;
they do. But the combination of real, thinking human eyes in a CGI
orangutan’s face are nothing to sneeze at. And Serkis, who gave the
one seminal motion capture performance to date in the Lord of the Rings
trilogy, tops himself here. The physicality of Caesar is like nothing
ever captured on film: a chimp too proud, too human to bend over
when he walks yet still seeming every inch an animal. I won’t spoil
just how well he learns to mimic human behavior by the end (there are several
great “CRAP, I didn’t think he could do THAT” moments), but Serkis the
gentile character actor gives himself over to a combination of simian and
human rage in the role that is frighteningly unique. You can just
see his eyes bellowing “they call me MISTER Caesar” as he has one indignity
after another piled on top of him at Landon’s facility. And once
he really understands how his fellow monkeys live, there’s no turning back.
Of
course, there’d be no planet of the apes if not for assorted treachery
and greed, but what makes the human side of Apes’ story work as
well as it does is that Will has a compelling reason to cut those fatal
corners: his father is dying. Lithgow gives the movie’s best
human performance, and it’s easy to see how Caesar becomes confused and
upset at his worsening mental condition. Oyelowo makes a solid greedy
bastard, and both Cox and Felton are strong as the fools whose casual ruthlessness
teaches Caesar the world would be better off without us. Franco is
OK when the focus is on his quest to save his father, but once the stakes
start to rise and his character turns on a dime from “I’ll do whatever
it takes” to “hold on, let’s put some common sense controls on this experiment”,
Will stops being interesting and never recovers. Of course, Caroline
never starts being interesting, thanks in part of Pinto’s not bringing
anything special to the role and it being a poorly conceived one (“You
did WHAT to monkeys? <beat> OK.”) to start with. And
Hewlett seriously overplays the crazy neighbor in a desperate attempt to
make sure we remember who he was at a key moment late in the game.
Hopefully, if the rebooted Apes saga gets another crack at a sequel,
Man will be better represented.
And
there’s serious reason to be interested in that sequel: Apes
is yet another modern summer movie hurting for two additional installments
to show up and complete that trilogy, but while casual fans might be surprised
by how open-ended it turns out to be, aficionados of the original will
be quite delighted by what background news reports and newspaper headlines
are setting up. And, of course, the movie works in its obligatory
nods to Planet, some quite clever (Caesar playing with a toy Statue
of Liberty and a really nice new context for the line “It’s a madhouse!
A madhouse!”).
Rise
of the Planet of the Apes delivers the goods for Apes buffs,
fans of motion capture FX in general and Serkis’ work in the medium in
particular (it’s really startling how much you can imagine that Caesar
is being played by Gollum when you look him in the eye), and fans of ‘what
if?’ sci-fi. It’s not all it could be, because its flesh and blood
characters don’t quite measure up to its CGI ones. But its' makers
have delivered the first legitimate contribution to the Apes legacy
in decades, and that’s reason to celebrate, not to damn them all to Hell. |
