This may come as a shock to some of the regular readers but I don’t care for the original Planet of the Apes movies. I know they’re considered classics of science fiction and all but to me they’ve always played out like some PETA member’s deepest sexual fantasies come to life. However, I do love James Franco. Anyone who has the balls to teach a class about himself and beat the piss out of Spider-Man is alright in my book. Seriously, if I wasn’t straight I’d be the first in line to have James Franco’s adopted babies and retire to one of his Caribbean villas.
So, for obviously not-gay reasons (I swear), I’ve been anticipating Rise of the Planet of the Apes for quite some time.
Though advertised as a prequel, Rise is no more a prequel to the original series than Batman Begins is to Burton’s batshit crazy films (see what I did, there?). It uses an entirely different set of characters and a much cleaner, less philosophically-driven story unlike its predecessor that worked under the assumption that apes were somehow immune to the nuclear holocaust that killed off human beings. It starts out in the jungle as a bunch of poachers capture a bunch of hilariously animated CGI apes and then one of them gets experimented on with a magical macguffin drug and then has a super smart baby that James Franco adopts…
Remember Deep Blue Sea? No? Wiki it for the next few minutes. I’ll wait.
I keep world-changing drugs in my garage fridge, too. Right next to the Coronas.
Yeah, it’s basically that with monkeys instead of sharks, except one of the monkeys is actually pretty awesome. Caesar, the ape that James Franco adopts, figures out that most humans are dickbags thanks to Draco Malfoy (and probably from watching a few episodes of Jersey Shore) then gathers up his brethren to revolt and escape to the California Redwood Forest, all the while spreading a disease that will inevitably kill off the human race.
Firstly, let’s get the good stuff out of the way (mostly because no one cares about good stuff). Rise of the Planet of the Apes is very well-written and what I think I like most about it is that it never quite overdoes anything. There are numerous references to the original film but none of them are so in-your-face that they’re practically winking at the camera. Well there is one; Draco Malfoy screams “you damn dirty ape!” much to the jizztastic ecstasy of all the 50-year-old nerds in the audience in one of the film’s few dumb scenes.
James Franco and John Lithgow are standouts as father and son and the chemistry between them feels genuine. In a totally not gay way, again. I swear. Again. The story is really more about the inter-relationship between Caesar and Franco and all the Gorilla vs Horse action shown to be so epic in the previews isn’t seen till the end. This is another reason I liked Apes so much: it paces itself. Everything gradually builds up very slowly until the monkey revolt at the end so when it actually goes down it has some sort of impact. An example of a movie that doesn’t do this is, I don’t know, let’s say Revenge of the Fallen, where the best action scene occurs in the middle of the movie so by the time the end comes we’re so desensitized to it that we really don’t care, anymore.
Rupert Wyatt, the director, also did a good job at keeping the apes sympathetic. It would’ve been easy for me to not root for the apes if they’d gone around cracking skulls and eating babies, but careful attention is paid to making sure that the apes don’t kill any (innocent) humans during their revolt, with Caesar even going so far as to save one police officer’s life from the clutches of a gorilla that looks suspiciously like my dad. By keeping the apes compassionate, they don’t go from the film’s heroes to the film's villains, which is an easy rookie mistake to make and one that I’m glad Wyatt avoided.
D'awwwwww
But to the steak dinner must come the crappy vegetable side dish that goes with it and Apes has quite a few little annoyances that keep it from being 2011’s second 4-star film.
Annoyance Number One: While James Franco and John Lithgow are awesome, the rest of the characters could have easily been replaced by cardboard cutouts accompanied by voiceovers and achieved roughly the same effect. James Franco’s veterinarian slumdog girlfriend has absolutely no purpose in the film and could’ve easily been cut out if not for the need to satisfy Hollywood’s minimum boob quota. And Tom Felton is so one-dimensional that he almost feels like a parody. His mistreatment of the apes is almost single-handedly the reason why they revolt; he throws food at them, stuns them, invites fratboys to make fun of them, etc etc, and some of his actions are so ridiculously evil that it ruins your suspension of disbelief. No one in real life is as big a douche as Tom Felton is in this movie, and usually people who are aren’t allowed near anything sharper than crayons, let alone stun guns.
Annoyance Number Two: While I applaud the use of CGI apes over midgets in monkey suits, they still just look…fake. Yes, the motion capture’s alright and individual apes look okay but when you throw so much digital animation on screen it starts to look like those scenes from Space Jam when Michael Jordan was running around the cartoon world. Come on, guys, I know you’re better than this. King Kong in 2005 looked fucking awesome; the fur glistened in the sunlight, you could see every nook and cranny on his face, every scratch on his skin, every piece of dirt in his teeth; these apes, on the other hand, don’t look much more advanced than the dancing baby that everyone fell in love with back when internet porn hadn’t yet taken over the world.
This. Is. San Francisco.
Annoyance Number Three: The ending. Oh, the ending. While it doesn’t have a bad ending by any stretch of the imagination, it misses an enormous opportunity with the absolute weakest send off between James Franco and Caesar they could’ve possibly thought of. Seriously, there would have been more emotional weight if they’d texted each other at the end. The entire movie had been built upon the relationship between this human and this ape, yet the scene when it’s finally time to say goodbye feels like it was shot the day before the movie released. Honestly, I’ve had more emotional goodbyes to the cashiers at McDonalds than the two main characters do, here.
Annoyance Number Four: This is by a wide margin the pettiest gripe I’ve ever had with a movie, but why couldn’t it just be called Rise of the Apes? I know that the producers probably just wanted people to know that it was associated with the original Planet of the Apes series but I mean in this day and age that’s probably not helping.
In all seriousness, though, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is very good and my little complaints drown in a sea of praise at the end of the day. Sure, most of the characters are stock and the CGI’s more distracting than entertaining but the writing’s solid enough to get it by. If you like monkeys and James Franco then there’s no reason not to see it, unless of course you’re allergic to awesomeness.