Our story starts with fathers and sons. Will Rodman (James Franco) has known nothing other than being a son, a son to a father who is very rapidly losing his grip on his mind due to a battle with Alzheimer’s. It’s because of this that Will has dedicated his life to creating a drug that can repair damage to the brain and cure the deadly disease. When we meet him he’s close to that goal. His drug, which is being tested on chimps, has had a profound effect on the brain power of a female named Bright Eyes, and the success has spurned the company Will works for to begin testing on humans and present the drug to investors. Until Bright Eyes goes nuts, destroys most of the labs and offices the company operates in, and gets shot dead in front of a table full of suits. After that the whole thing is off. The chimps are ordered euthanized, the project is ordered shut down, and Will’s dad is out of luck. Except Will isn’t willing to accept defeat so easy.
You see, Bright Eyes didn’t go nuts because of any side effect of the drug; she had actually just given birth and was instinctually trying to protect her baby from all the prodding lab techs (how she could have been secretly pregnant while enduring a gamut of medical tests is one of those flaws of the film you need to get past). Her son, Caesar, escaped the deadly needle of corporate downsizing, so in a moment of compassion Will decides to take the baby home. And in a moment of desperation he takes a sample of the drug to test on his rapidly deteriorating dad. With these two decisions, Will ends up learning what it’s like to be a father. He raises Caesar up, and when he discovers that the young chimp has inherited his mother’s intelligence, he teaches him the ways of the human world. And simultaneously he takes care of his father, who experiences a miraculous recovery under his son’s illegal treatments. The strength of the bond between fathers and sons is strong, and the pain when they are broken is immense. Once his father’s recovery reverses and a related incident leads to Caesar being confiscated by animal control, Will has to experience that pain on two fronts, and the conflict begins.
This domestic drama section of the film is the weakest, but it’s not because the relationships shared by Will, his dad, and Caesar don’t work. It’s mostly because their travails are interspersed with clunky bits of exposition and hurdles of disbelief that you need to jump over to set up the second half of the film. Once we meet Caesar, we start to care about he and Will’s relationship, and we watch him get locked up in an abusive government facility, then the interesting stuff can happen. It’s even before he gets taken away that Caesar begins to question his existence. He lives alone as a singularity, not quite animal and not quite man. Up until this point in his life he’s never been around other apes, and once he gets thrown in jail he goes through a period of being the new guy. This is where the film goes from the Frankenstein story to the prison drama. Caesar goes from being the fresh fish getting jumped in the prison yard, to using his intelligence to become the guy in charge who knows how to get you what you need. It’s a classic jail story, and it works great even when told through apes.
Or maybe when told through these apes, which are largely effects creations by WETA, the same company who created Gollum for The Lord of the Rings. If Caesar didn’t work as a believable character, then this movie wouldn’t have worked, bottom line. And honestly, the chimp animation is a little hit or miss; but she’s got it where it counts, kid. What misses a bit is the animation when Caesar is young, bounding around a house, and interacting with Franco’s character. In those cases he can appear a bit cartoony. There’s a disconnect between what really exists and what doesn’t. But where the effects succeed, and in fact soar, is in the emoting of Caesar as an actor. In that second half of the film, when he’s surrounded by other apes of similar computer compositions, and where much of the focus is on his thought processes and emotional development; you believe him and become affected by him just as much as you would be by any flesh and blood actor. A lot of the credit has to be given to the motion capture performance of actor Andy Serkis, but how much isn’t quite clear. How much of what we see is Serkis, and how much is detail and nuance added by the skill of the WETA animators? This is a relatively new art form and we haven’t yet invented a way to credit it, but what Serkis and WETA have been doing together is amazing.
While Caesar gives us a great performance, the human actors are less reliable. Franco is an actor that goes from compelling to wooden, scene-to-scene, in every movie I’ve seen him in. The big scenes, the emotional stuff, he knocks it out of the park. But during the smaller scenes, the ones where he’s giving voice over exposition or performing clinical lab stuff, Franco couldn’t appear less interested. Conversely, John Lithgow plays the Will character’s father, and I found him to be a bit hammy during the scenes where he was most afflicted by his illness, but I really thought he delivered during the quiet moments between father and son. Freida Pinto gets a raw deal as the love interest. Pinto is a stunning creature. There is so much warmth and life in her face that she is always an interesting screen presence; but the filmmakers here don’t seem to think that she can do much more. She’s here just to be the girlfriend. It feels like somewhere late in the development process somebody realized there weren’t any female characters and she got shoe horned in.
But all of that is just picking nits in the face of what this movie is able to accomplish. From the first scene on it builds a narrative that puts you in the perspective of the apes and makes you sympathetic to their plight. Seeing as the end game of this story is man being wiped out and enslaved by talking apes, getting the audience to sympathize with them is the most important trick it needed to pull off. How do you get a room full of people to root against their race? By making the apes just as human as we are. Through the character of Caesar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does that and more. Some of the other apes even get a chance to shine as well. That Gorilla, Buck? He’s a hero. And Maurice the Orangutan? What personality. Not only was I with Caesar and his gang all the way through, I wanted to stand up and cheer during their big moment standing up to the government on the Golden Gate Bridge. Character depth, revolutionary effects, big action sequences, and a climax that will have lasting effects both for the world as a whole and on a personal level for the characters we’ve come to care about; that’s all it takes to be the most satisfying of the studio movies of the summer. Of the. Some of these other shallow explosion fests should take note.
