Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt – 2011 – USA
 

The whole Planet of the Apes concept is so great and bursting with potential; it’s amazing that we can’t seem to get more than one great film out of it.  The four sequels to the original 1968 movie were progressively weak and cheap; (though at least they admirably maintained a fierce social cynicism).  There was a TV show spin-off, an animated kids’ show, Tim Burton’s 2001 “re-imagining,” and now a prequel reboot that takes us back to pre-Ape earth to see how it all began.  The transition from human to ape domination was also covered in 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, though the new film makes a number of changes in the Apes mythos.  In general it suffers from being removed from the politically and racially charged milieu of the early seventies, when it was quite obvious that the Apes films were using science fiction to comment directly on racial injustice.  In ultra-safe and politically correct 2011, such a film can only present itself with total sobriety as a straightforward drama about an ambitious researcher (James Franco) testing an anti-Alzheimer’s serum on super-chimp Caesar, (a CGI effect animatronically performed by Andy Serkis apparently for no other reason than because Serkis played Gollum and King Kong in the same way; though personally I doubt that anyone would know the difference if someone else took a stab at it).  Accepting brooding matinee-idol Franco as a scientist might be difficult, but overall the build-up to the climactic Ape revolt keeps things moving.  Ultimately, though, the treatment is not very different from recent superhero movies, in that a modicum of very obvious relevance is smeared over a string of even more familiar action sequences.