Big Screen Peter: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

review by Peter Lewis

Those damned dirty apes are back, far surpassing the projected returns for its opening weekend. This is certainly good news for the film’s financiers, but grim news for most non-simians moviegoers: we’re going to be subjected to a sequel to this prequel.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is a slow burning film, admirably doing the mundane legwork to develop the plot and, to an extent, the characters. Academy Award nominee James Franco plays Will Rodman, a leading research scientist for Gen-Sys, a leading pharmaceutical company based in the Bay Area of Northern California. Rodman begins testing a genetically engineered retrovirus on chimpanzees. The drug, he hopes, will combat the effects of Alzheimer’s, a disease ravaging his father (played by John Lithgow).

These early portions of development work. It’s easy to see what’s driving Rodman so fervently. He wants his father to be normal and healthy. And it’s an affecting premise, but it comes at the cost of his own logic. Rodman begins to see the possibilities inherent in the drug, but not the drawbacks. 

Even after the shuttering of his program, as Rodman begins to see the intelligence possessed by Caesar, a test subject’s offspring, Rodman fails to recognize the unnatural and harmful effects within his situation. By harboring this hyper-intelligent simian as a quasi-family member, but separated from the wider world, without an social integration, Rodman creates a bubble life. When this cloistered world collapses, it causes irreparable harm to the psyche of Caesar and pushes the film toward its inevitable close.

And it’s here that the film begins to fall apart. After a nasty run-in with a neighbor, Caesar is removed from Rodman’s care by court order. It is in the confines of a primate habitat that Caesar begins to emerge with the unifying personality his namesake indicates. The animals, severely mistreated by the sadistic staff, are molded into a (fighting) unit under Caesar’s auspicious tutelage.

When the revolt of the chimps finally comes, it’s entertaining stuff. Rampaging primates are certainly an awful prospect.

And to that end, these scenes are well-shot, doing much to make the audience empathize with the panicky populous on screen. But it’s still a bit much to swallow that in our gun-toting, trigger happy society these few dozen primates couldn’t be taken out before escaping across the bay and into the Redwood Forest.

Perhaps that’s why the location of San Francisco was so key. Only there, in that thriving liberal metropolis, would rampaging animals be safe from civilian pot shots and mass execution at the hands of the authorities.

The crux of the closing sequences of the film revolve around the beasts capacity for pacifism. This irony plays out while the group is escaping/rampaging through the Bay Area. Save for those particularly culpable humans, people were knocked out or generally left unharmed. In this capacity the film points to our own soft predilection for other animals, propping them up as uniquely noble. Which is just a crock of leftist shit. This prequel is a new twist on the white man’s burden and the societal tendency to mythologize things like the noble savage.

While the concept of the film offers many intriguing philosophical debates, the execution falls well short of anything beyond average. Just another good idea gone wrong, riddled with holes and lacking any semblance of urgency due to the preposterous concepts.

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes is playing at the Carmike 14 and the Malco Cinema 12 in Fort Smith, and the Malco Van Buren Cinema. Link here for time and ticket info.

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