Rise of the Planet of the Apes
A charming family drama saves the apocalypse for the end credits.
Your parent and your child can’t function without you. Cognitive decline or physical infirmity leaves the elder as helpless as the toddler. What can you do? Help Dad fall gracefully. Teach your son how to rise.
Sandwiched between the old and the young, chemist Will Rodman (James Franco) tries hard as a caregiver. He breaches medical ethics to give his addled father (John Lithgow) experimental Alzheimer’s medication. The same drug turns a lab chimpanzee super-smart, before she fatally rampages. Her orphaned baby absorbs her brain-sparking neurogenesis in utero. Will sneaks the little ape home and studies his astounding intelligence. Eight years later, now-grown Caesar (Andy Serkis) is more than just research. “I’m your father,” Will tells his chimp ward. Rise of the Planet of the Apes blurs the lines. The good doctor’s family is his test subject.
Rise was 2011’s August surprise. That summer was Pirates 4 and Transformers 3, Harry Potter ending, Marvel still beginning. This random reboot came from an unknown director, Rupert Wyatt. Married screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver were two decades off their one notable hit, 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Franco was an in-demand young actor and a failed Oscar co-host pranking soap opera performance art between grad schools. Later events erased his peculiar phenomenon, so it’s prophetic how completely Rise veers its attention away from Will. The original series took three movies to shift focus across species lines. Here, that inversion takes under an hour.
Years after Gollum and King Kong, Andy Serkis wasn’t yet an obvious tentpole personality. I think he had something to prove. So Rise rapidfires his Caesar through a chaotic coming-of-age. We watch his adorable babyhood, energetic adolescence, and hardened maturity. From a lonely life as the secret kept up in the attic, he emerges into rebellion. Caesar unites his fellow simians, and literally expands their minds. Sweet moments of dinner-table intimacy segue into urban melee.
For all this to work, Caesar needs to be a cuddly Frankenstein Castro. Serkis’ amazing performance is all the more impressive because the special effects are maybe halfway there. The face is marvelous; the body, whoof. When Caesar climbs a towering redwood, music soars, camera swirls, and his arms swing all Tekken. Every Planet’s apes are questionable somehow, but Rise is the series’ first total step from analog past to digital now. Modern CGI makes astounding fantasy authentic while flunking basic realism. You believe the gorilla pulling insurgent ground-to-air maneuvers. But the fog looks wrong and the fur is Astroturf.
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