Rise of the Planets of the Apes as reviewed by Daniel Abromowitz
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good, good film, but you wouldn’t know it from the first twenty minutes, or the lead actors, or the plot summary, or the trailer, or the title. A whole host of factors work to bring Rise down to being another bit of plastic in the summer CGI-fueled bargain bin, but somehow, they don’t really get in the way.
The biggest impediment to the film’s success is its ostensible star, James Franco, who continues his marathon sleepwalk of a film career as a researcher developing a cure for Alzheimer’s, driven by the deteriorating mental state of his father, a criminally underutilized John Lithgow. Heartened by the success of the drug, which has managed to bolster the intelligence of the apes in Franco’s labs far beyond usual ape levels, he petitions the caricaturishly greedy CEO of his generic movie pharmaceutical company to let him begin human testing; seeing dollar signs, he approves (sample CEO line: “You make history, I make money”).
Unfortunately, the program is shut down after an ape goes berserk protecting her infant son, who Franco smuggles home in the wake of the subsequent ape slaughter. Turns out the mother has passed her thinkin’ genes on to her son, and Franco has a new home project, monitoring both his father’s improvement as Franco administers the drug to him in secret and the ape Caesar’s rapidly ballooning brainpower.
The early stages of the film are populated by a slew of flat, cardboard cut-out “characters.” There is the bleeding-heart ape handler, the greedy executive, the veterinarian love interest met by accident (so forgettable that the Wikipedia plot summary doesn’t even mention her), and the cruel but dumb animal control guy (Tom Felton, unfortunately typecast and a bit too gung-ho about his American accent). Franco himself is occasionally painful to watch, bringing the same valium-fueled detachment to a movie featuring ape fights that he brought to hosting the Oscars. His greatest on-screen achievement is looking pouty even while asleep.
Lithgow and Brian Cox as the owner of some kind of ape pound are bright spots, but both are shackled by being often catatonic and disinterested, respectively. That said, there is enough joy to be found in watching John Lithgow yell at a chimpanzee to carry the film through the necessary throat-clearing.
While Franco gets top billing in a flagrant slight against apekind, the indisputable star of the film is Caesar, whose rise from li’l rascal to revolutionary is portrayed magnificently by motion capture maestro Andy Serkis, in a performance on par with his work as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series. While a little shiny and a little rubbery (though far less rubbery than usual for an Apes film), the apes of the film, especially Caesar, are also shockingly expressive, and though the film occasionally falls back on sign language with subtitles to get a particularly complex conversation across, Serkis manages to say almost everything he needs to with gestures, subtle shifts in posture, and a body language vocabulary that’s both very human and not. And when the apes enter the picture, so to speak, the humans, thankfully, are forced to step aside.
Aficionados of the Apes franchise may take issue with the film’s dismissal of the history established in Escape from… and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, taking a leaner, Batman Begins-esque approach to the source material instead, with sequel options left open-ended. The film is stronger for its limited scope, which allows it to focus on Caesar’s story, one worth telling, rather than trying to explain in two hours why the Statue of Liberty ends up buried in sand. In an interesting twist, all references to Charlton Heston’s histrionics spring from the mouth of the comically vile Felton, a move that feels heavy-handed at first but sets up a pivotal and entirely jaw-dropping moment. By relegating the the role of humanity’s champion in the original film to a sniveling man-child, Rise hammers home what you’ve been suspecting the whole time: the humans of the film just don’t matter. Their time is past.