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.
