Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) dir. Rupert Wyatt
Starring: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, Brian Cox, John Lithgow

***

By Alan Bacchus

Revolution is in the air – Apes revolution. It’s hard to believe this Apes franchise continues to fascinate people and have legs. The original film was high-concept science fiction at its best – metaphors for our own human frailties in the real world at present. The concept here, of course, is a future world turned upside-down, where apes have replaced man as the dominant species. Rupert Wyatt’s take on the series has him going back in time for an origin story, something we were first exposed to with 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but with little resemblance other than the setting in the past. Here, the depth and complexity of the CG-enhanced Apes characters tips the scales past the uniformly cardboard human characters resulting in a surprisingly absorbing, exciting and fresh invigoration of this series.

Of course, the first film based on Pierre Boulle’s original novel was the best. Nothing will take away from the power of Charlton Heston’s discovery of apes riding horseback wrangling up human slaves, or the astonishing revelation of the Statue of Liberty lying collapsed on the beach at the end of the film. There are no moments or twists as such in this picture, and the film doesn’t need them. We know the story, we know where it leads and the thrill here is showing the tragic irony of hundreds of years of man’s blind arrogance playing with science, and the catharsis of having animals fight back against a lifetime of subjugation by their higher intelligence ‘superior beings’.

In this case, all the blame falls on James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, a biological scientist looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Of course, he’s experimenting on chimps and when one of them starts to exhibit signs of intelligence his superiors in the corporate office take notice and encourage it. But after the experiment fails and the chimps escape, they’re all put down with the exception of one cute little infant named Caesar (Serkis). Will brings up Caesar like a child in his home along with his Alzheimer’s-stricken father (Lithgow) and lovely girlfriend (Pinto).

The ethics of raising a chimp with humans never enters Will’s mind, but the subjugation of his animal instincts are offset with his broadening intelligence. All the while, this internal conflict simmers within Caesar. After an anger-fuelled attack on a neighbour, Caesar is forced to go to an animal shelter managed by a heartless and cruel Brian Cox and Tom Felton. Here, Caesar uses his intelligence to communicate with his fellow simian prisoners and plot escape, revenge and ultimately the takeover of the world.

Admittedly, the human characters are uniformly forgettable and sometimes laughable. Franco, in particular, should never have been in this film. It actually takes a special kind of actor to make pseudo-science and other expository stock dialogue sound believable. Franco’s lazy acting style, which works in comedy and other stoner-persona performances like Milk, is not a good fit here. In fact, he seems to be in the same funk as his Oscar hosting gig. Everyone else is a cardboard characterization in the extreme. Brian Cox and Tom Felton as the cruel animal shelter caretakers are low-grade comic book villains at best, and the money-grubbing corporate suits are similarly one-dimensional.

But the complexity of the ape characters more than makes up for these deficiencies. Andy Serkis, who by motion capture portrays Caesar from birth to his ascension as leader of the Ape revolution, is phenomenal. The technology has little to do with the performance. I bet if Serkis were put into the old make-up style of the original series, he’d give the same quality performance. The fact is we can see the development of intelligence in his delicate facial movements. As we see Caesar grow up in the company of Will, a prison of its own sorts, sequestered from his own kind, we can’t help but identify with him. The need to be free is a universal quality of all living species, but self-determination is distinctly human. And the discovery of this trait within Caesar occurs gradually and with subtlety. That said, it also helps that the apes actually look like apes. The Weta-Digital CG technology achieves this in spades.

Despite the shameful characterization of the animal shelter, these scenes sufficiently put us on the side of the apes and by the end we desperately want Caesar and his growing army of prisoners to throw some beatdowns on the humans. There’s very little action in the film until the third act, and even when the intensity is ramped up there’s more logic than we would expect from the big scenes.

And at the end of the day, Apes accomplishes its goal as a continuation of its high-concept antecedents. Without overwhelming proselytization, we can’t help but think twice about the effect of keeping animals as pets, or using them to experiment with in science, or as beasts of burden. And at the very least we will recognize the precariousness of our place in the bio-lifecycle of the planet.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) dir. Rupert Wyatt
Starring: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, David Oyelowo, Tyler Labine and David Hewlett

*

By Greg Klymkiw

I have absolutely no knee-jerk prejudice against remakes, reboots, sequels or prequels as the number of good and/or even great ones is impressive. I do, however, have a problem with bad and/or mediocre and/or (worst of all) unnecessary movies - whatever they may be.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - save for the millions of dollars it will bamboozle out of moviegoers in its first week - has no real reason to exist.

The movie is about NOTHING.

It is rife with long, dull scenes that go nowhere.

The screenplay, such as it is, has not (I suspect) actually been written, but assembled with alphabet blocks by chimpanzees - not very bright ones at that. The chimps deserving the blame for their less than stellar work are Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver whose credits include - ahem - The Relic (a watchable monster movie), An Eye for An Eye (a watchable vigilante movie) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (a watchable thriller). The accent here is clearly on "watchable" - an achievement not quite attained by Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Not only have these two simians delivered an inconsequential plot that's about nothing, but they've populated the landscape with the dullest roles imaginable. Oh, and if anyone thinks I'm merely picking on the writers - I am. They're also the producers of this thing.

Bottom line: This movie is not worthy of the Original Five. It'd be a tough act to follow. In contrast to the work generated by the writers (and I reiterate - producers) of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the collective writing talents behind the five original Planet of the Apes movies wrote screenplays for the likes of Frank Capra, George Stevens, David Lean, Martin Ritt, William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, Franco Zeffirelli, John Frankenheimer, Roger Corman and Martin Scorsese.

This alone should be enough to rest my case.

But I won't. Let the flagellation of Rise of the Planet of the Apes continue.

What a cast has been assembled to render this monkey house of purported characters.

Leading man James (127 Days) Franco sleepwalks through his part as a chemical manufacturing scientist who creates a drug meant to cure Alzheimer's that instead kills humans whilst creating a new super species of ape.

John Lithgow goes through the motions of delivering a professional by-the numbers performance as Franco's addled Dad who is briefly revived by Sonny-Jim's chemical discovery before he plunges into further madness and finally death.

Frieda Pinto parades her vacuous beauty about whilst exuding intellect as blank as an unformatted floppy disk in the role of Franco's zoo veterinarian girlfriend - a real stretch unless one believes veterinary colleges are in the business of graduating animal doctors with less intelligence than their patients.

Delivering exceptional work in spite of nothing resembling writing employed in the creation of his role as an animal shelter administrator, Brian Cox, one of the world's greatest living actors, might have actually benefited if something as unimaginative as a recognizable archetype might have been devised to allow for some virtuoso scenery-chewing.

Playing the least compelling corporate villain ever committed to celluloid, the non-entity that is David Oyewolo is so bland that not even good writing would have saved him as a pharmaceutical company baddie who - wait for it - is more interested in profits than science.

Then there are stellar supporting performances from actors playing scum-buckets so well that one wishes they either had a better movie to be in (like Tom Felton as the vile animal shelter attendant) or David Hewlett as Franco's nasty next door neighbour who hates monkeys and berates old men with Alzheimer's. He really should have been cast as the central corporate baddie instead of the aforementioned bland loser they DID cast.

And Lest We Forget - Andy Serkis, the somewhat overrated CGI body double who previously and famously aped (as it were) the character of Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here he gets to play Franco's pet chimp Caesar who is more intelligent than Albert Einstein and leads a grand monkey revolt. Don't get me wrong, Serkis IS a good actor, but what he delivered for Jackson finally works as well as it does because the writing is great and the CGI is stunning. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the non-writing, ho-hum direction and obvious CGI gives us so little to root for that the gymnastics of Serkis's apery is all for naught.

While a solid, simple plot can have considerable merit in providing a perfectly manufactured coat hanger to adorn with cool shit, this pathetic new sequel/prequel/remake/reboot or whatever the fuck it's supposed to be is so lacklustre that I struggled in vain whilst waiting for something - ANYTHING - of any consequence to happen.

It didn't.

In a nutshell, here's the plot - or rather, grocery list:

Scientist discovers miracle drug to cure Alzheimer's.

Said drug turns chimp into Super Chimp.

Alas, same drug kills scientist's Dad.

Scientist raises chimp as own child.

Girlfriend pops in and out of movie to smile stupidly.

Chimp gets into all manner of shenanigans.

Chimp bites finger off next door neighbour.

Chimp is incarcerated in animal shelter full of apes.

Chimp leads ape revolt on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Chimp leads apes to freedom amongst ancient Redwood trees.

Next door neighbour - afflicted with deadly virus - casually goes to work as airline pilot, finger miraculously intact.

Spreads virus worldwide.

What, I ask you, is this movie actually ABOUT?

The original 1968 Arthur P. Jacobs production of Planet of the Apes was dazzlingly directed by the great Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), superbly adapted by Michael (Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia) Wilson and Rod (The Twilight Zone) Serling from Pierre Boulle's brilliant novel "La planète des singes" and featuring a stellar cast that attacked their roles with relish.

And what roles they were! The makers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes might have thought to take their cues from the original source for the necessary inspiration. In addition to having a great square-jawed hero in the form of the cynical, no-nonsense astronaut Taylor (Charlton "GOD" Heston) the original movie boasted a terrific array of colourful supporting characters that great actors like Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans played to the hilt. The only thing the Rise team might have been influenced by was the role of Nova in the original, a staggeringly beautiful, but equally blank leading lady. Smartly, this character in the original was mute whereas this awful new reboot chooses to allow Freida Pinto to open her mouth - thus forcing the already leaden lines she's been given to thud to the floor with greater force than a body hitting the pavement from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Planet of the Apes was, still is and always will be a great picture. (Let's forget, however, that the moronic Tim Burton remake even exists. Though dreadful as it is, it's fucking Rembrandt compared to Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The first time I saw Schaffner's Planet of the Apes was as a nine-year-old lad, sitting in the front row of Winnipeg's long-shuttered picture palace the Metropolitan Theatre (where Guy Maddin eventually shot Isabella Rossellini in the stunning My Dad is 100 Years Old). It was the first time I got gooseflesh in a movie. So profound was my experience that it was, indeed, the movie that compelled/condemned me to a life of servitude under the pleasurable shackles of motion pictures.

I have seen the picture well over 100 times since and most recently, watched it with my 10-year-old daughter during an Ape marathon prior to seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I was, in fact, really excited to see the new picture which, I suppose adds profoundly to my disappointment.

Schaffner's picture is a genuine classic. It holds up as powerfully as any great piece of superbly executed populist cinema should. Mysterious, thrilling, funny, intelligent, propulsive in all the right ways and a movie replete with thought-provoking thematic elements about religious fanaticism suppressing science and new ideas, the topsy-turvy look at humans fulfilling the role of "dumb beast", notions of time and time travel and the devastating effects of war, it's a picture that has not dated.

I always have maintained that its cinematic storytelling techniques are so classical and finely wrought and its technical virtuosity so ahead of its time that the movie could be released virtually untouched and I suspect it could/would be as big a hit NOW as it once was. Most tellingly to me was just how compelling the movie was for my little girl. She remained stapled into the chesterfield, her eyes transfixed upon my hi-def monitor and nary one bathroom break. The discussion we had about the movie afterwards centred on the IDEAS as much as it did about the story and how entertaining it was.

No similar discussion occurred after watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Because, frankly, it's really about NOTHING. The stakes for the characters in the original film were always tied to the issues it explored, whereas the stakes for all the characters in Rise are rooted in not much of anything - save for James Franco's selfish, whiny and somewhat unconvincing need to prove that his new drug will work.

As a kid in the years between 1968 and 1970 when the first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes finally appeared, one of the things that haunted me - nay, OBSESSED me! - was a lingering question I had at the devastating ending to the first film. When Chuck Jesus H. Christ Heston rides deeper into the "Forbidden Zone" and discovers (thanks to the writing genius that was Rod Serling for coming up specifically with the ending) that he is NOT on another planet, but a nuclear-war-devastated Earth in the future, I was chomping at the bit to learn what our astronaut would find in the wasteland AFTER he discovers a half-buried Statue of Liberty in the sand.

What Heston finally discovered (along with James Franciscus, a new astronaut who follows a rescue-mission trajectory to the monkey planet) was a crumbling Manhattan beneath the desert populated by Doomsday-Bomb-worshipping mutants with telepathic powers who were about to be attacked by an army of war-thirsty gorillas.

Jesus Christ Almighty, indeed!

Just the plot alone as penned by veteran screenwriter Paul (Goldfinger, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Murder on the Orient Express) Dehn was original enough to keep one riveted. More than the plot, though, was that - AGAIN - the movie was actually ABOUT something.

Even though the picture is a tad perfunctorily directed by stalwart hack Ted (Hang 'em High, Magnum Force and the genuinely wonderful Go Tell The Spartans) Post, Dehn's superb screenplay challenged us with notions of blind militaristic rage (including a peace march as reflective of the Vietnam War, which could have - in parallel contrast - provided a backdrop to the new picture with respect to America's idiotic "War on Terror"), religious fundamentalism justifying war (from both the apes AND the humans) and most terrifyingly, the whole notion of peace through superior firepower.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes has no such ideas. Though it's set in contemporary times and could have explored terrorism, blind militarism, rising fascism/fundamentalism, the financial crisis, the oil crisis - any manner of issues facing the world today, it chooses Instead, to focus upon the corruption inherent in pharmaceutical companies, Alzheimer's disease and cruelty to animals. These issues are not without merit, but they're just there to serve the non-plot, almost as a necessary evil to be touched upon and dropped quickly in favour of dazzling CGI.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes appeared a year after Beneath the Planet of the Apes and even at the tender age of 12 I remember thinking, "What is this shit? A sequel? They blew up the fucking Earth!" (I had a salty tongue even back then.) When I saw the picture - as a kid and even now after umpteen viewings - I was dazzled.

The real star is again screenwriter Paul Dehn as opposed to actor-turned-competent director Don Taylor who, in fairness, DID direct a fine’ 70s version of The Island of Dr. Moreau with Burt Lancaster and the cult sci-fi classic The Final Countdown. But what a GREAT script! What first-rate sci-fi!!!

From a plot standpoint, Dehn delivered a perfectly plausible twist via a new character called Dr. Milo who, like Cornelius and Zira, was an ape scientist who defied the "law" of fundamentalism, resurrected and repaired Chuck Heston's spaceship and then all three simians of science followed a backwards trajectory just before the Earth is destroyed and wind up BACK in time. This was also a clearly fascinating way to utilize the notions of time and space and, in its own way, delve into quantum physics and the early postulations of parallel universe theory.

This third official Apes sequel delivered up clever satirical goods, explored issues of women's' rights (plus animal rights - far more effectively than Rise), immoral interrogation techniques and most importantly studied the world of fanaticism/militarism within higher levels of government bureaucracy and how THIS is where the true power often lies and where sick, corrupt values run rampant.

What it does here so magnificently is how it offers up a great villain in the form of a German-born scientist/political advisor (a la Henry Kissinger) played by the wonderful actor Eric Braeden (who had a hugely successful career as a soap opera TV star, but most notably appeared in the great ‘70s sci-fi thriller Collosus: The Forbin Project from screenwriter James Bridges and the underrated director Joseph Sargent). Braeden is such a nasty, vicious, homicidal government bureaucrat and his great performance and superb characterization thanks to Dehn's writing puts the lacklustre aforementioned villain in Rise to complete and utter shame.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, is as sharp a sequel as the third instalment - replete with great writing from Paul Dehn and the added bonus of thrilling direction from J. Lee Thompson, the man who gave us the brilliant, original, utterly chilling Cape Fear as well as some of the greatest action epics of all time like North West Frontier, Taras Bulba and The Guns of Navarone. This particular sequel tells us about the rise of Caesar, the ape child of Cornelius and Zira who leads the simians in revolt against their human oppressors.

Conquest is the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes most closely resembles, yet pales most mightily against. Conquest deals head on with the issue that plagued (and continues to plague) America most doggedly - that of slavery and, includes good dashes of America's susceptibility to right wing government rule. A thoroughly effective repellent performance from Don Murray as the fascist California governor racing to eventually become President of the United States (he and his minions always wear black-coloured uniforms hearkening to both Nazism and Italian Fascism) is so politically charged - not just for its time, but like all great classics, resonates in a contemporary context.

Rise has no such villain and virtually NO political context. I'll not speak too much about Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the fifth official sequel and perhaps the weakest entry in the series, but even still, in its exploration of the early beginnings of the fundamentalism that eventually grips even the apes, it makes the new film look so puny in comparison.

Rupert Wyatt is a dreadful director. The pace of Rise is herky-jerky and the final action set piece on the Golden Gate Bridge - which should be spectacular - is yet another madly constructed action scene from a director who couldn't helm action to save his life.

The worst element of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is in its over-reliance upon CGI. The effects are relatively effective, but they're not there to serve the story, but to merely serve themselves. The stunning makeup effects for the apes designed by John Chambers in the ‘60s blow ALL the CGI totally away. The makeup allows great actors - throughout the original Apes series to actually deliver real performances and, thanks to terrific writing, inject considerable life into the proceedings.

Rise from the Planet of the Apes is, in contrast, moviemaking at its most dreadful - bereft of ideas, good writing and direction from someone who has a vision and/or the virtuosity to create popular cinema of the highest order.

Perhaps the most disgusting thing about the new film is that it fails to acknowledge the author of the original novel and the screenwriters (primarily Paul Dehn and Serling) of the original series in the head credits.

This is ultimately a disgrace.

Do yourself a favour and either skip Rise of the Planet of the Apes or, if you feel you must see the picture at all, try to watch the original films first.

You'll see the difference!