Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

During the filming of The Lord of the Rings trilogy Andy Serkis was known to have remarked that after a day of giving his all as Gollum (whilst trussed up in an unflattering body stocking), he’d return to his trailer and realise that he wasn’t going to be onscreen. Well after King Kong, Captain Haddock (in Tintin this Christmas) and now Caesar to his name, his ego bruising experience on The Two Towers has certainly paid off. Arguably Serkis’ name is the one that should be headlining this film, because it ain’t James Franco that is pulling in the punters (sorry James) and that’s just name recognition we’re talking about. Serkis, for all intensive purposes could be called the Lon Chaney for the digital era but in the case of this film, it’s only the beginning of the problem.

Caesar the ape, played here by Serkis in motion capture courtesy of Weta Digital (as opposed to Roddy McDowall under John Chambers’ latex appliances) is apparently a real chimpanzee given a mind-enhancing drug (created to cure Altziemers) which enables a rapid change in his cognitive abilities from basic chimp antics to being able to solve puzzles designed for eight year olds, at the age of three. The problem though is we never accept Caesar and his ape co-stars AS apes, just performers pretending to BE apes. This curiously has been a problem since the last attempt to revise Planet of the Apes (the ‘reboot’ under Tim Burton), not because of the methods used but because of the apes themselves. Originally they were intelligent apes that acted like humans, Burton’s film unadvisedly had its simians converse and yet lope and leap like normal apes. Here the apes are simply apes; the illusion is scarcely maintained in CGI. Using motion capture to record human actions onto apes is a problem as they are not the actions of apes but humans, so we are always aware of the human element (crucially not the ape element). Dr Zaius in the original film commented “to suggest we can learn anything of the simian nature from a study of man is sheer nonsense”, ironically that is true here. For all of its adherence to biological fact, what we are watching is nothing more or less than anthropomorphism.

The decision to forgo makeup does carry the feeling of an industrial verdict; ‘CGI is the future therefore advance it’. The result lacks physical presence and comes off as a simulation; the quality veers back and forth between excellent and rubbery. Interestingly, the apes in this film are at their most impressive in close ups, anything else tends to become less convincing. Additionally the direction of some of the animation is questionable at times: does Caesar really need to swing around the house like Spiderman? This is substantially damaging when the apes do things so extreme at times that it is nigh impossible to suddenly shift from a premise reworked to fit in a hypothetical ‘reality’ to demanding we suspend disbelief. A chimp may be five times stronger than a human, but it is highly doubtful that one could leap through several plate glass windows without so much as a scratch.

The set up of the original film was brilliantly simple: Charlton Heston is the only intelligent human on a planet ruled by super intelligent apes. And within that simple premise, the film exploited just about every social issue that ran rife during the sixties (racial segregation, civil rights, religious dogma etc) and even today is debated as a social Rorschach blot, covering everything from rationalism to Marxism. Rise of the Planet of the Apes on the other hand, is a complex science fiction idea attempting to set up a simple premise (a supposed cure for Alzheimer’s is tested on a chimp… blah blah blah – and then he escapes) worse still, like Burton’s film before it, it is a conceptually empty piece of work, unless you consider the injustice of animal cruelty an extensive talking point (for five minutes). This is also a problem in how we perceive the apes themselves, Caesar and his ape brethren obtain the ability to think, problem solve and communicate (maybe even talk), yet the best they can do with their newfound intellect is run amok in San Francisco.

Much like Burton’s misfire, the film is doomed to fill its blockbuster quota of thoughtless action sequences. Yes, the original Apes film had action but it was never the focus, the focus was in the novelty of watching a council of orang-utans debating whether or not Taylor (Heston) was indeed as smart as them. Rise however is simply another in the long line of sci-fi spectacles that exist on the premise that we want to see robots, aliens or in this case apes blow things up (even Inception is by default an action picture). Like I Robot before it, the subject matter of its premise is used as padding for by-the-numbers action. A precursor to Apes has been done before (the series has a cyclical narrative, owing to time travel elements) and has covered much more intriguing ground, including the creation of the Ape culture. The story here barely even gives any impression of greater things to come, this isn’t so much of a ‘revolution’ as a baby step toward the notion of what may be a revolution.

Rise boils down its premise to an outbreak, no different than any zombie apocalypse. The fatal flaw of this film is that it presumes the novelty of the series has been in how the apes came into power, the truth is that the novelty was in the fact that the apes were IN power. As a result the movie is never as chilling, exciting or as disquieting as it needs to be.