By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: New. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Three Stars)
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Three Stars)
U.S.: Rupert Wyatt, 2011 (20th Century Fox)
1. The Rise
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, latest chapter in an old franchise, shows us a story we too easily forget, or maybe one that we never really knew…
…How it all began, how an imprisoned, persecuted and seemingly rag-tag army of CGI chimpanzees rose up, found their leader (our great hero Caesar), how they threw off their shackles, unlocked their cages, overcame their vicious keepers (including sneery Draco Malfoy of Harry Potterland, or Tom Felton himself), and then stormed through San Francisco, an unstoppable, swarming tide of apes unleashed.
Yip!
SPOILER ALERT
Ah, what a day that was! On and on they came: the chimps and the orangutans and the mighty gorilla, unlocking cages and emptying primate labs and terrifying unsuspecting zoo-patrons, while streaming down the streets, leaping along the roofs, and swinging through the trees, until finally, with the grim determination of the heroes of Troy, of Thermopylae, of Gettysburg, those fearless apes — our ancestors, my children — made their stand, even as a herd of dangerous looking human police, heavily armed, stood poised to block their way on the final leg of their journey in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge. What a terrible, awful glorious day! The wind rose. Helicopters hovered. Automatic rifles click-clicked. And facing it all, eyes calm, lips curling in chimp reflection, was our leader, Caesar, and the mighty hero warriors behind him, and the greatest hero of all on that terrible and glorious day, that god of all apes, the Mighty Gorilla!
END OF SPOILER
Did we win, my children? Well, how the hell do you think you got that 1968 hit movie Planet of the Apes and four sequels? What do you think inspired that film epic, the movie that the human Franklin Schaffner directed from the human Rod Serling‘s script of the the human Pierre Boulle’s novel, the one with human-and-a-half Charlton Heston yelling “Take your stinking paws off me!“ (A science fiction classic if there ever was one — and our revenge for all those King Kongs).
And how do you think we got all those Planet of the Apes sequels (Beneath, Escape, Conquest, Battle), and that failed attempt (by Tim Burton ) to restart the series with Mark Wahlberg, and the programs on TV and all those damned Planet of the Apes plastic toys you keep waving and bouncing on the floor and that some of you are even trying to eat. Of course we won, you little chimp hellions! You think Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans are nothing but special effects! You think Chuck Heston is chopped liver?
Caesar. I Remember Caesar…We won that day! And we’ll win again if they send us up to Washington D.C. and turn us loose on those over-dressed, phony tea-sipping idiots who took over Congress just as we took over the zoo. (But we had dignity: we didn’t piddle all over the zoo afterwards.)
Yes….Yip, Yip, Yip…Your grandfather remembers…Those were the days…What’s that, my child? Why am I crying? It’s nothing… I was just remembering our other ancestor, our spiritual leader, Nim Chimpsky of Project Nim and what happened to him…For a moment It made me sad.
That was reality, a different thing, a different place. I’ll tell you about it some day, my children, because of course, we‘re not real…We’re all of us just dreams. But it made me melancholy…Nim…Nim…If only you could have been with us that day!
2. Human Talk
Actually, speaking as a human, I liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes very much — even though it’s obviously better directed (and acted) than it is written. The best of Rise is so damned wonderful, and the worst of it so damned silly, that it’s sometimes hard to believe, as you watch it, that you’re in the same movie you were in ten minutes or so ago.
Still, the very best scenes — usually ones involving Caesar the lead ape (as acted by Andy Serkis), with his piercing dark eyes and sometimes poignant, sometimes chilling quietude, a leader of the revolt that we know will eventually take over the planet — are among the best scenes in any blockbuster of summer, 2011, or for several summers.
I liked so much of Rise that I‘m willing to forgive or ignore that rushed ending, the underdone script, the sometimes silly plot twists. Movies after all, are a visual art as much as a dramatic one, and this movie has some visual miracles for us: The CGI that allows the moviemakers to create that army of apes, and most of all to the effects that let Sirkis, in performance capture, help create that wonderful illusion of a chimp, Caesar. They‘re truly astonishing, immersing, often beautiful, and worth any ticket.
The film’s scenes are sometimes moving too, especially the two-or-three-cornered scenes with James Franco (I promise: no Oscar show jokes) as pharmaceutical scientist Will Rodman, who’s trying to develop an Alzheimer’s vaccine or drug, and John Lithgow as Will’s Alzheimer‘s-stricken father, pianist-teacher Charles, who can‘t play Bach any more (and then suddenly can), and with Caesar the chimpanzee, their secret house guest (rescued from an experiment gone wrong). These sequences are sometimes very emotional, as with the exchange of glances that pass between Caesar and the Rodmans at various times in the story. Or the moment when Caesar gently reaches over, when Charles, confused, holds his fork wrong at a meal, and the chimpanzee switches it around for him.
The Golden Gate Bridge standoff comes without enough buildup, but it’s a stunning action scene, and the big stunt with the gorilla and the helicopter is a real rouser. And when Caesar says — well, I won’t tell you what he says, but it’s as memorable as anything out of E.T. or Lassie Come Home. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good movie, a very good movie at times. It’s just not a great movie. But it has great stuff. Sometimes script weaknesses aren’t that important.
3. Cesar and Nim
There’s a clever spin to the story’s beginning, especially since almost everyone who sees this will know not only how it will probably come out, but how all the subsequent events may probably play out as well. Here, writers Jaffa and Silver imagine Will working on his Alzheimer’s cure, called ALZ 112, a drug that radically improves brain power (Limitless, anyone?), sees the project abandoned by Will‘s greed-crazed boss Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo), after Bright Eyes seemingly runs berserk all the way from her cage to a board meeting. (Actually she‘s trying to protect her child).
The project is abandoned in disgrace (ironically like Project Nim in the current documentary) and 12 of the experimental chimps are put down. But Will is persuaded to save the 13th: Bright Eyes’ little son, Caesar. He takes him home, still works secretly on ALZ 112, and gives the drug to his father Charles, who can suddenly play Bach and Debussy again, and to Caesar, whose intellect jumps enormously.
Absurdities accumulate. How does Will manage to sneak out Caesar and the drug and work on them for so many years, without anyone noticing, and without him being excited enough to bring the drug to somebody’s attention for all that time? And why does the love interest Freida Pinto, of Slumdog Millionaire, as Caroline the veterinarian, show up so late?
Somehow it doesn’t matter. Some how all the short cuts and implausibilities of the script are beaten down — not completely but enough — by the sheer brilliance and panache of this movie‘s visual realization, by director Wyatt, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy) and production designer Claude Pare, and by the power and brilliance of Serkis (our old pal, the Gollum), and the splendor and exhilaration of the scenes where the camera follows “him” as “he” leaps from room to room at Will’s place or from tree to tree in Muir Woods.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes reminds you of Project Nim in other ways. We begin with Caesar in all his glory, the human’s favorite, just as we had Nim in all his glory in the first act of Project Nim. Then, grimly, Caesar, like Nim, hurts or menaces a human (though Nim‘s attack is a mystery, and we know Caesar was rushing to the aid of the threatened Charles). And he‘s incarcerated (like Nim) in a grim, sad second act. Caesar is persecuted by a brutal keeper (Felton), ignored by a brutal manager (Brian Cox), and turns naturally to his fellow apes. Nim, we feel, remains an exile all the rest of his life, his potential wasted. Cesar rises up and carries the other apes to CGI glory with him.
The movies are different. But that’s because Project Nim is a documentary, a window on the truth, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes is movie science fiction, a window on a dream. That’s what we usually buy at the movies: a fantasy of empowerment. Project Nim is reality, a different thing, a different jungle, a different place. If we can just get out of this cage, maybe we’ll find it.
Extras: Commentary by director Rupert Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver; Deleted scenes; Featurettes; Art gallery.
