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Home>Movie
Reviews>Rise
of the Planet of the Apes Movie
Review Before discussing the connections
with the original movies, first, we
need to take a look at Rise of the
Planet of the Apes. The film stars
James Franco as a scientist
working for a genetics research lab
which apparently ignores PETA, since
much of their research is done on live
primates. Franco's character is
attempting to develop a cure for
Alzheimer's, a disease which afflicts
his father, played very skillfully by
John Lithgow. While testing his
attempted cure, Franco injects the
experimental drug into a chimpanzee he
calls "Bright Eyes." She develops
advanced intelligence as a result of
the drug, and Franco is encouraged
enough to (illegally) inject his father
with the drug, with initial positive
results. One highlight of this film is
the tenderness shown in the
relationship between the son and the
father. Both Franco and Lithgow do a
very good job conveying how the pain
and suffering incurred by Alzheimer's
afflicts the victim's relatives as well
as the person falling into
dementia. Long synopsis made short, a problem
back at the lab causes Franco to
(again, against the rules) bring home a
baby chimp that was the offspring of
the super-intelligent Bright Eyes. As
it turns out, this chimp child, named
Caesar, inherits the drug-enhanced
intelligence of his mother grows into a
simian with the intelligence of a very
smart human. One thing leads to
another, and Caesar gets into trouble
with the law, and is locked up in a
primate sanctuary that is basically a
jail where dozens of unwanted apes are
kept in captivity and treated with
sadistic cruelty by one of the
employees, played by Tom Felton
(Draco Malfoy of the Potter movies).
Felton plays a character who exhibits
far less humanity than Caesar, and he
does it with a casual sinister sneer
that will get him well-deserved
typecasting as a bad guy. Even Malfoy
did not act this cruel! As we know from the trailers, Caesar
leads his people in a rebellion against
the humans, and, Moses-like, leads them
out of the wilderness of the human city
and into the safety of the forest. In a
literary sense, Caesar is the classical
Romantic hero, a very unique
leader-character who seeks to right the
wrongs done to his "people," and then
leads them out of the urbanized, evil
city of humans to the clean, safe,
green sanctuary of the forest. And, to
carry the literary and historical
allusions even further, the Caesar of
this film, is in many ways, a simian
Moses, leading his people out of
slavery and literally into the
Wilderness of Muir Woods National
Monument forest north of San Francisco.
And, to get the apes to the wilderness,
Caesar must lead them across the sea
(San Francisco Bay). In the scenes of
the bridge from above in the movie, the
viewer can see the bridge as "parting"
the waters ala Moses in the Book of
Genesis. Oh, and on that point, the
Moses analogy is even stronger
considering that the lab that created
the super-intelligent apes was called
"Gyn-Sis." Subtle biblical allegories,
eh? For those of an older generation who
remember the original movies, here are
a few thoughts on comparisons to the
older versions of the film. This movie
contains several Easter egg-type
moments, from the news story of the
launch of the Icarus space craft which
takes Charlton Heston in the original
movie to the Planet of the Apes. We
also see Heston in a brief glimpse of a
television show (could not tell if it
was from his ape movie). The scene that
connected most strongly with the old
film is where the sadistic Draco
Malfoy, eh, I mean Tom Felton, is about
to hit Caesar, and Caesar grabs
Felton's arm to stop the blow. Felton
shouts "Take your hands off me, you
damned dirty ape!" Now, as any "Apes"
fan knows, that is the most famous line
spoken by Charlton Heston in the first
Apes movie, and it is when he was being
disciplined by an Ape. The shocker in
that film was that the humans in that
Ape-dominated world were unable to
speak. Charlton actually speaking was
amazing to both the apes and humans in
that 1968 scene. Likewise, apes in the
real world aren't supposed to speak,
and this moment, after Felton repeated
Heston's line, is when Caesar speaks,
and says, in English, "No!" to his
human tormentor. In this sense, the
modern scene is a mirror image of the
scene in the original film, with the
roles of master and slave reversed. Overall, the Rise of the
Planet of the Apes is a good
film, and well worth watching. The
means by which the apes gain
intelligence and language are more
logical than the means in the old
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes from
1972. The acting is good, (Lithgow is
still my favorite), and the moral of
the story is that if you aren't nice to
the animals, they could rise up and
kill us all. Oh, and the way in which
the human race as a whole falls to the
apes, is also quite logical in this
film, though I won't give it away here.
See this movie! Movie
Review Summary: A
positive review of Rise of the Planet
of the Apes with comparisons to the
original Planet of the Apes films.
Rating: 3.5
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