Summer School: 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' (2011)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's big returning franchises.

I debated whether to include both the recent prequel/reboot series and the original series as part of my Planet of the Apes catch-up, since they don't fit together seamlessly, but in the end I opted to include them all, since the shifting nature of timelines and the ability to change and influence the future is one of the key themes of the series. So while Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn't strictly a prequel to the original Apes series, it could very well fit in as an alternate-timeline version of the same events, as described by the "shifting lanes" metaphor used by Dr. Hasslein in Escape and the ape scientist Virgil in Battle. Unlike Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes remake (which I'm leaving out), Rise isn't a retelling of the original movie's story, or any particular story from the original series, but a fresh start on the concept of how hyper-intelligent apes took over the Earth.

My initial review of this movie when it was released in 2011 was not very positive (in contrast to the overall critical acclaim), and I thought I might be more engrossed by it this time around, especially since the reputation of the whole prequel series has been so strong. But I still came away mostly unmoved, even with the ability to view this as the opening chapter to a trilogy rather than a standalone story. It's still unforgivably slow and plodding in its first half, and it still barely gets to what's potentially interesting about the story until the movie is almost over. It still basically kills the majority of humanity with some graphics during the closing credits, a decision that's even more bizarre given how that huge plot point is considered decidedly taken care of when the next movie begins (how many people who saw Rise turned it off before witnessing the most important development in the entire story?).

On the plus side, the special effects are still pretty amazing (this movie does not have the budgetary limitations of the original sequels) and have held up well, and Andy Serkis brings a remarkable expressiveness to his motion-capture performance as Caesar, the ape with boosted intelligence who leads the revolt against humans. And the last 20 minutes or so are pretty thrilling, as Caesar's mob of intelligent and regular apes rampage across San Francisco, commandeering the Golden Gate Bridge, defeating their human pursuers and fleeing into the forest to start a new life. It's just that there's more than an hour of superfluous other stuff (boring scientific ethics debates, James Franco barely trying, sadistic animal handlers taunting the apes) before we get to the action. Franco's character, who's attempting to develop a drug to fight Alzheimer's (and testing it on chimps, which eventually leads to both the intelligence boost for apes and the inadvertent death of most of the human race) is particularly dull, and his ethical quandaries are not nearly as engaging as the allegorical elements of the original movies. His romance with a pretty veterinarian (Freida Pinto) is equally dull, and his relationships with Caesar and with his Alzheimer's-afflicted dad (John Lithgow, giving the movie's most affecting performance) are only slightly more lively.

The screenplay by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver takes itself awfully seriously, and the hyper-realistic apes add another level of solemnity. That makes the semi-campy nods to the original series (especially the sneering primate sanctuary employee played by Tom Felton yelling, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!") feel particularly jarring and out of place. I did like the sort of background subplot of the spaceship Icarus (piloted, presumably, by George Taylor) getting lost in space, which could set up its return at some point in the future. But mostly this is a movie that strains to seem thought-provoking, while its efforts to explore deeper issues only keep it from getting to the part of the story that's actually worth telling.