My exposure to the Planet of the Apes mythos is limited to a scene at the end of Mel Brooks' 1987 sci-fi sendup Spaceballs, and the much reviled 2001 remake by Tim Burton starring Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham-Carter. Suffice to say, then, that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic for the reboot when the ads for it first started playing a few months ago.
My wife was the one who first piqued my curiosity by showing me an interview that James Franco did for the movie, in which he predicted, with tongue probably half-in-cheek, that critics would hate it. My wife, half in jest, said we should watch the movie to support Franco.
With all due respect to the other cast members who appeared in the Spider-Man film series, Franco does seem like the most versatile in terms of acting chops, and daring in terms of role choices, having played the gay lover of Sean Penn's character in Milk and a rock climber who has to cut off his own arm in 127 Hours, the latter of which nabbed him an Oscar nomination. Sure, people talk about how he dropped the ball with a pretty bad job at hosting this year's Oscars, but I think it'll take more than a hosting gig gone bad to keep a good actor down.
And a good actor Franco definitely is. In this film he plays a scientist named Will Rodman, who works for a major pharmaceutical company and whose main preoccupation is coming up with a cure for Alzheimer's disease, with which his father Charles (John Lithgow, in a wonderfully moving performance) is currently afflicted. His company experiments on chimpanzees with great success, but a terrible incident with one chimp has the boss of the company (David Oyewolo) deciding to put all of them down. As it turns out, however, the real reason the ape went amok was that she believed her baby, which no one knew about, was in danger, and because one of the other scientists is too squeamish to put the baby chimp down, Will, who is similarly reluctant, ends up taking him home.
Suddenly, Will finds himself growing attached to the baby chimp, whom he names Caesar, and ends up raising him to adulthood. The chimp likewise bonds with Charles, and in the course of the development of this relationship Will is astonished by how intelligent Caesar actually is, having apparently inherited the intelligence that his mother obtained from the Alzheimer's treatments. Breaching protocol and ethics, and desperate to see Charles well again, Will begins using the drug on him. When Caesar gets into an accident, Will takes him to a vet, the lovely Caroline (Frieda Pinto), who eventually becomes Will's girlfriend, and between his recovering father, his genius of a chimp, whom Will regularly takes to a Redwood forest preserve to climb the trees and have fun, life couldn't be better for Will.
Things, however, take a turn for the worse when when Charles relapses, apparently due to his body's ability to resist the treatment. A misunderstanding involving Charles and the Rodmans' neighbor make Caesar believe that Charles is threatened, and he assaults the hapless neighbor, getting taken away to what appears to be some kind of ape shelter for his mischief, where the caretaker Dodge (Tom Felton) is as cruel to him as Will was kind. Unfortunately for Dodge, however, Caesar is getting smarter by the day, and doesn't intend to stay cooped up forever, and he figures he'll have a better chance busting loose with the help of the other apes.
I wasn't particularly keen on watching a movie that I thought would be about apes taking over the world, whether or not it was because of humanity's foolishness and hubris, but I'd like to reassure anyone similarly leery of this film that, whatever the title and trailers of this film may suggest, it's not like that at all. Sure, there is a bit of the "ape uprising" that the trailers suggested, but at its heart this story is about a rather moving family relationship, made particularly impressive by the fact that one of the family members is basically a digital effect (even though the actors got to work opposite motion-capture veteran Andy Serkis rather than a tennis ball or some other marker).
No new ground is broken here, not even in terms of visual effects (although they are quite wondrous to behold), but the execution of the effects is easily the best I've seen all year, even when stacked up against such tentpole films as the Harry Potter conclusion and Thor. The CGI used to bring the film's apes to life is simply the refinement of techniques that have been around for over a decade now courtesy of WETA Digital, but director Rupert Wyatt uses the technology to incredible effect. The apes are central to the story, but at no point to they overwhelm it; their seamless integration into the narrative is less a function of proper lighting and animation and more one of some pretty steady direction and performances by the actors who both play the apes and those who play against the apes. Andy Serkis, of course, is the star of the show even the audience never sees his actual face.
This is no slight to Franco, however. It is thanks to his wonderfully grounded performance that all the science is properly contextualized. Franco is key to this film, just as Serkis and WETA are, because it is Will Rodman's discussion of the medication that places the story firmly in a reality the viewer can embrace for a couple of hours. I have know idea how believable the science in this film was, and for all I know it was a complete load of malarkey, but Franco sold me on the idea completely. More than that, though, it's his genuinely moving relationship with his father and Caesar that really serves as the beating heart of this film. Caesar is only able to reach his potential because of how Will nurtures him over the years, and it is not something the hyper-intelligent ape forgets.
I've always liked John Lithgow as an actor, but there's something about the gentleness and vulnerability with which he portrays Charles Rodman that really made me look at Alzheimer's in a totally new way and made me fully understand on an emotional level why Will would want to cure him, even though on an intellectual level it's already an easy enough concept to understand. Like Franco, Lithgow helps bring Caesar to life with his performance.
The actors are ably backed up by some of the best (if not necessarily the most novel, or even the most ostentatious) visual effects of the year, some striking cinematography by Andrew Lesnie (who, like Serkis and WETA, is a Lord of the Rings veteran) and a nice, sweeping musical score by Patrick Doyle (who also helped Thor along nicely with some pretty hummable cues as well).
What really strikes me about this film is that at no point does it strive to be "epic;" there are no money shots, and almost no Zack-Snyder-slo-mos, and no overbearing music cues. The filmmakers one and all simply focus on telling a good, compelling story, if not necessarily an original one, and, to my mind, succeed immensely. There are a number of hints at a sequel, of course (considering that this is, after all, the revival of a franchise) with the only truly gratuitous one being the appearance of an ape whose sole apparent purpose is to look evil and foreboding, and who will probably be set up as a major villain in future films. That notwithstanding, the film stands quite well on its own, and its easy to forgive the filmmakers their aspirations towards a sequel after such a satisfying film.
This movie, especially when juxtaposed against Tim Burton's 2001 disaster (which, as I understand it, was a highly unpleasant experience for Burton himself), is a classic example of how a truly good film is all in the execution.
5/5
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