Rise of the Planet of the Apes, by British director Rupert Wyatt, is an entertaining and thought-provoking movie. The following is a review of the movie, without any ‘spoilers’ that might detract from you actually enjoying the movie if you have not already seen it. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a prequel to the iconic 1968 Charlton Heston classic Planet of the Apes, and it has a good storyline that generally fits in with the earlier Planet of the Apes’ theme.
Kudos to the director and entire film team for refusing to use any live animals in the making of this film – demonstrating just how unnecessary it is to continue to use live animals in the movie making business.
Set in present day San Francisco, Caesar's mother is caught in the jungle and brought to the US for animal experimentation as the pharmaceutical company is developing an Alzheimer's cure and believe they need to test the drugs on human’s closest animal relative - chimpanzees. The human lead is Will Rodman (James Franco) who is trying to develop the cure to help his father (well acted by John Lithgow) who has dementia.
Natural chaos or disorder occurs as with all mainstream narrative cinema (following the trajectory of order, disorder, order restored – well, sort of). Things go haywire at the lab, and the baby chimp Caesar is taken to Rodman’s home, where he grows up into a young chimp with high intelligence and develops a close bond between all three (Caesar, Rodman and his father). A TV spot in the movie tells of the Icarus spacecraft being lost around Mars (a nice homage to Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes movie).
The cast actually does a good job of integrating with the special effects, with none of that ‘looking almost in the right direction’ at the digital creation, helped no doubt by acting with real actors who are then digitally altered into apes.
In particular, Andy Serkis who plays Caesar (he was also Gollum in The Lord of the Rings), with the help of some great digital special effects, is a very believable chimpanzee who is infected with some form of brain enhancing virus that raises his intelligence above many of the humans in the movie. For some reason, perhaps because we see the young Caesar behave like a young child, show tenderness, care and a sense of humor, it is really easy to empathize and feel for Caesar in the movie, and to take his side when things get a bit more troubled and violent. Many of the other apes, who Caesar frees and shares the brain boost medication with, also highlight some of the original characteristic of Planet of The Apes’ movie franchise – that chimpanzees are intelligent and caring, orangutans thoughtful but distant, and gorillas provide the muscle when needed.
James Franco is the main human protagonist as the principal researcher leading the development team who are creating the new drug that inadvertently raises Caesar’s intelligence. Tom Felton (Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy) plays a particularly loathsome character in the Ape Centre where Caesar is held due to a court order restraint. Let’s just say what goes around, comes around.
However, my main complaint is that the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, even though at pains to clearly show the viewpoint of the animals and generate enormous empathy for the creatures, still operates to normalize animal experimentation as a necessity for creating and testing various medications and products which are designed to help human life at the expense of animals. The need for the continuation of animal experimentation, is, in part, overly emphasized through the highly sentimentalized relationship between James Franco’s character (Will Rodman) who is desperately trying to save his beloved father from the ravages of dementia.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe the vast majority of audience members will walk away from this film with any new respect or understanding of animal sentience and the immorality of using animals for medical experimentation.
Order this film on Amazon.com - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Visit: http://www.apeswillrise.com/
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