Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Rupert Wyatt (2011)
Stick to your instincts and ignore (most) reviews. When it opened a few weeks ago, Sally said she’d quite like to see it. In the last fortnight I’ve read a rave by David Denby and a piece by Michael Wood, in which he also covered the documentary Project Nim and which made clear, once you penetrated the trademark egotism of Wood’s criticism, that he was very interested by both pieces. I’d got the idea from Denby and Wood that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a radical departure from the earlier episodes in the Planet of the Apes series (I’ve seen only the first of these) – that this new film was a genuine human-simian drama. I wasn’t sure, though, why, if it was so different from its predecessors, its title implied otherwise – unless to fool the presumed audience for the picture. I understand now: I’m the one who was fooled.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes involves James Franco as a scientist in San Francisco who’s developing a cure for Alzheimer’s and trying it out on chimpanzees, who develop a human level of intelligence as a result. The Franco character brings home from the lab a baby chimp, who’s inherited the strain from his mother. She had been given the drug before she went apeshit protecting her young one and was shot dead for her pains. Franco’s father, a classical piano teacher in an advanced stage of dementia, takes a shine to the young chimp, named Caesar. Son gives father, played by John Lithgow, the miracle cure and he’s back to his best on the piano in no time. In not much more time, Lithgow is regressing and Caesar, for reasons I can’t be bothered to record, is behind bars in a kind of chimp penitentiary. At first, I was impressed by the remarkably speedy progress of the narrative and the blithe priority placed on getting from one thing to the next without worrying in the least about varying tempo or developing characters. But it turns out the only reason for this briskness is to arrive, as soon as possible, at the point at which explosive mayhem can get underway. The whole film runs only 105 minutes yet the mayhem goes on for hours.
The film-makers have it both ways. We’re meant to see the apes as wickedly mistreated by misguided or vicious humans but the action is supposed to derive its power from the monkeys’ frightening propensity for violence. By well before the end I just wished, as I did with the velociraptors in Jurassic Park years ago, that the beasts would just go away, not because they were scary but because they were boring. The apes are digitised: people will think it’s brilliantly done but as soon as Caesar arrives home with Franco he seems incongruous in the texture of the real setting. It still looked to me essentially like Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke with the cartoon characters in Mary Poppins nearly half a century ago. As occasional relief from the pyrotechnical carnage (shot by Andrew Lesnie) and editing (by Conrad Buff and Mark Goldblatt), there are beautiful shots of the apes swinging high in sunlit redwoods etc. In one extraordinary sequence, a suburban street is transformed in the early morning by the huge shower of leaves the apes cause. The trouble is, so much technique goes into cinema adverts that all this reminded me of was the commercial we’d just seen, in which popcorn rains from the skies.
Caesar is ‘played’ by Andy Serkis, Hollywood’s leading exponent of this kind of portraiture following his Golem in Lord of the Rings. He’s been highly praised for how moving he is here. I couldn’t bear to go and see Project Nim because I knew it featured a real animal being abused in the name of science. I was not only dry-eyed but detached watching a man in the form of a digitised ape pretending to be a monkey with human possibilities – even when Caesar find his human voice and bellows ‘No!’ (and especially when, at the end, Franco offers to take him home and, standing with his legion of fellow apes under the redwoods, Caesar whispers ‘I am home’). You’re watching this creature at goodness knows how many removes.
Apart from Caesar, I’ve not used the characters’ names because the script, by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, doesn’t do characters. Franco, Lithgow and David Oyelowo, as the evilly mercenary CEO of the drugs company Franco works for, are all fine actors but you’d never guess it from seeing them here. Blankly beautiful Freida Pinto, as the vet who treats Caesar for a leg wound and then becomes Franco’s girlfriend, adds an unintentional twist to proceedings: there’s no doubt that her acting is much less evolved than that of any of the monkey-men. The playing of the baddies in the story is ridiculously bad: Oyelowo; David Hewlett as a neighbour who’s apoplectically aggressive even before he starts to succumb to the fatal effects of Franco’s second attempt to develop a retrovirus for Alzheimer’s; Tom Felton as the psycho-seeming son of the owner (Brian Cox) of the sanctuary-prison Caesar’s shut up in.
There were some very young kids in the audience at the Richmond Odeon. When we left, Sally compared the press-the-buttons violence to a computer game: the more I thought about this, the more dismayed and out of touch I felt. It seemed to me that children watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes might be upset by the keeping-a-wild-animal-as-a-household-pet element: it’s as if the processed blood and gore – what I find hardest to take in a film like this – is not only the commercially safest but the emotionally least disturbing part of the thing. I think the makers of this film are playing more than two members of the audience for idiots, though. The sub-plot of the deadly virus that strikes down one of the lab workers (Tyler Labine), who then sneezes it over the nasty neighbour, is handled very perfunctorily. The thrust of the film’s climax is about the apes taking over San Francisco. It is amusing watching them swing under the Golden Gate bridge – although not as amusing as when David Oyelowo shouts, ‘That’s him – that’s their leader!’, pointing at Caesar from miles up in a helicopter.
After the closing credits are underway, the neighbour arrives at an airport terminal. He emits a large glob of blood onto the parquet floor. It turns out he’s an airline pilot … he’s going to: lay the grounds for a sequel – the director Rupert Wyatt is clear that this picture is the first of a new series. Wyatt might be saying: ‘You didn’t even notice I’d practically forgotten about the deadly virus, did you? To serve you right, I’ll deliver the punchline when your back’s probably already turned’. (A weird side effect of the virus is that David Hewlett seems by this stage to be mutating into Colin Firth, the only really good joke in the film.) Rupert Wyatt directs throughout with complete confidence. That may be the worst thing of all about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, although there’s stiff competition.
11 September 2011