Rise of the Planet of the Apes [Review by Haus]

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is awful. Parsi is seduced by its allegedly baldfaced references to earlier iterations in the series. I am not. I don’t even know if I’ve seen the original one. I definitely saw the Marky Mark one, and thought that was pretty stupid. I’m pretty sure this one is stupider still.

This is ostensibly an origin film, setting up the backstory that — years distant — will yield the Planet of the Apes (either the Charlton Heston or the Marky Mark version, your choice).  The secret truth, of course, is that this planet — where apes rule and have enslaved humans — is Earth! Oh snappers! And Soylent Green is people!

The stats: It’s directed by the unknown (to me) Rupert Wyatt and stars James Franco and Freida Pinto along with Brian Cox and John Lithgow (and the venerable creature actor Andy Serkis). The animation is good — you sort of don’t notice it’s animation. The apes look fairly real. But it’s awful.

Franco plays a “scientist” (in quotation marks) who’s developing a putative Alzheimer’s cure capable of spurring neuroregenerative growth. He delivers it to apes via a viral vector and finds that it makes the apes smart. (He also alleges that his brand of retroviral gene therapy is hereditary, which means it’s doing some funky stuff in the germline too — no matter, could have been worse. I was braced for a backstory keyed to Lamarckian Evolution.) He rescues a clever baby chimp named Caesar and raises him almost as a child. Along the way he dates Freida Pinto, a sexy veterinarian. He meanwhile administers his potion to his father (Lithgow, who of course suffers from Alzheimer’s) who briefly profits from it. Caesar has some growing pains (as real chimps often do) and winds up in a sort of ape-jail. There, he interacts with and ultimately “educates” his stablemates and off they go to take over the world.

Problems abound, chief among them being that Caesar is unquestionably the star of this movie and I found him wholly unsympathetic, verging on unwatchable. He’s a vaguely mean-looking, steely-eyed brute who mopes about and appears to have no love for anyone. I gather that some bond was meant to exist between Caesar and Franco, but none was convincingly displayed on screen. Caesar, to me, always looked hyper-moody or ready to rip throats. It’s not hard to make apes lovable — films have been doing it for decades. Now granted, perhaps Caesar isn’t meant to be lovable or even likable, but forcing a non-vocal glaring protagonist on us — especially one that is pretty much just a moody teen in a monkey suit — doesn’t make for a particularly engaging film.

Caesar meets other apes in captivity, most notably a “circus orang-utan” with that intense pie-plate face they sometimes get. I found this “character” intolerable, not only because he sabotaged utterly the fiction that apes only get smart through exposure to Franco’s wonder-drug but also because he was just so hackneyed.

This brings me to perhaps my biggest beef with this picture: real life chimpanzees are much smarter than this film gives them credit for. It’s as though the screenwriters decided to make “smart apes” without ever bothering to understand real primate social interaction or the way unenhanced, everyday apes behave around humans and one another. The chimps in this picture virtually never behave like real primates — they’re either strangely puzzle-smart or stupid and oafish. It’s an unrealistic and unflattering portrayal. This goes for the bad as well as the good: real life chimps routinely execute absolutely savage attacks on people, yet in this film their beatdowns are strangely tame. Take home: actual chimps are much more interesting than digital ones.

Another major problem is the at times heavy-handed undercurrent of “evolution” that stinks up this pic. “Evolution becomes revolution,” the tag line says. I’m not sure who besides these writers would term human-directed retroviral gene therapy “evolution,” but I got a bad feeling during this film. Scientists will know what I mean. It’s that feeling you get while watching some corn-fed nutbar pontificate about how he’s never seen a chicken turn into a lizard, or a monkey turn into a person, so evolution is hogwash. (Anti-evolutionists frequently batter such straw men, most likely because the truth of evolution is rather less sexy, rather less controversial, and rather harder to debunk. Being true.) Anyway, this film co-opts the term “evolution” not just in passing dialog — see, e.g., X-Men — but rather more insidiously in a sort of extended on-screen pantomime. If you take one thing from this review, take this: evolution is nothing like this. Like, at all.

Grand scheme issues aside, the film doesn’t even work on its own terms. When Caesar runs rampant around town liberating other apes (solid trailer material, by the way) these apes inexplicably multiply dramatically in number. And just like in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, there are also scope troubles: too few cops, strange isolated battles, and too limited an impact on the real world. Nothing we’re watching would scale up into a real threat. Criminal apes of this ilk would swiftly be shot. They’d do no better at outsmarting bullets and raw numbers of cops than their human counterparts.

A word about James Franco. I don’t mind him, sometimes. He can be quite watchable indeed, he can be kind of eh, and he can be just plain hollow. (If you don’t feel like clicking those last three, they’re Spider Man movies. Three of them.) He could have saved this film, but he doesn’t. Make no mistake: This is Spider Man Franco, not 127 Hours Franco. Not even Academy Awards Franco. Spider Man Franco. You’ve been warned. (Some of the Act I dialog between Franco and his “bucks before science” boss is truly punishingly bad.)

That’s it. This film sucks. I hated it. It was nearly unwatchable, and I love apes. But these digital apes are stupid and arrogant and boring, the humans are two-dimensional caricatures, and the writing is awful. It does offer a few (unintentional) laughs — such as a particularly droll wistful moment between Franco and Pinto in Act III — but nowhere near enough to recommend it.

HAUS VERDICT: Visual cool-sauce squandered utterly on a nonsense plot, annoying protagonist and homages no one under 50 will get. Really, who thought this was a good idea?

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.