Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a film about the roots of the Great Ape Revolution, is something of a misnomer.  Earth is already the planet of the apes, since we humans fall into that category.  Perhaps a better name might be Rise of the Planet of the Rest of the Apes.

Nevertheless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does the impossible.  During the film’s climactic man-ape battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, we viewers know that mankind’s only hope is the complete destruction of the apes fighting to get across that bridge.  Nevertheless, we root for the chimps and gorillas and orangutans.  We, the audience, root for the success of our enslavers.

Wow.

Rise does this not only by anthropomorphizing a chimpanzee, but by making the anthropomorphization of said chimpanzee the actual subject of the film’s narrative.  We begin in an African jungle.  The chimp’s mother is captured, dragged away from her tribe, and injected with some kind of super chimp serum.  Later, when the mama chimp gives birth, we bond with her cute li’l offspring.  So does James Franco, who plays a scientist who adopts the infant and raises it like an odd cross between a child and a dog.  As the chimp will soon learn, however, Franco’s family represents the sum total of nice people in the entire universe. 

Here’s the problem: chimps don’t stay cuddly forever.  When they grow up and they get angry, they can kill people.  After our hero chimp, named Caesar (modeled by the talented Andy Serkis), attacks the Francos’ mean neighbor, he’s packed off to a facility for primates (No, not a hockey arena.  This is a facility for higher primates.).  The facility, more prison than sanctuary, becomes Caesar’s crucible: the place where he grows out of his trust for humans and into his role as leader of the ape revolution.  By the time he leads his comrades across that bridge, we’ve seen him endure so much cruelty at the hands of humankind that we really do root for him.  We want him and his comrades to find a better life, to find a way out from under the thumb of their enslavers.  What a wonderful exercise in cognitive dissonance!

The film couldn’t pull this off without selling us on its world, and Rise succeeds through smart casting, brilliant animation, and solid scoring.  The Franco family includes the likeable Franco himself, the also likeable John Lithgow, and the luminous Freida Pinto (of Slumdog Millionaire).  Brian Cox leads Team Evil, with help from Tom Felton and David Hewlett, and all three sell their villainy with gusto.  (They also all happen to be English, which calls into question the seriousness of the flag-less ape threat.)  {Note: If I were a better writer, I could have come up with a better Eddie Izzard callback.  We do what we can with what we’ve got.}  The animation, well, it’s wonderful.  We believe in these apes.  We believe in their weight and momentum and the emotions on their faces.  The music, well, I’m a Patrick Doyle fan and I have been since Henry V.  His score builds the world and fills in emotional beats that animated apes may not have been able to convey on their own. 

In short, not only does Rise of the Planet of the Apes work, it works wonderfully.  This ape found himself rooting for the competition against his better judgment, and he never thought that would happen.