Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Movie Reviews (4 in 1) EXCLUSIVE

A Twentieth Century Fox release presented in association with Dune Entertainment of a Chernin Entertainment production in association with Ingenious Media. Produced by Peter Chernin, Dylan Clark, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver. Executive producer, Thomas M. Hammel. Co-producers, Kurt Williams, Mike Larocca. Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Screenplay, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver.

Will Rodman - James Franco
Caroline Aranha - Freida Pinto
Charles Rodman - John Lithgow
John Landon - Brian Cox
Dodge Landon - Tom Felton
Steven Jacobs - David Oyelowo
Robert Franklin - Tyler Labine
Rodney - Jamie Harris
Hunsiker - David Hewlett
Caesar - Andy Serkis
Maurice - Karin Konoval
Rocket/Bright Eyes - Terry Notary

A curious chance for humans to revel in their own destruction, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" makes for an impressive, if predictably downbeat prequel to a franchise famous for unhappy endings. Thanks to stunning advances in performance capture technology, director Rupert Wyatt successfully ditches the cumbersome makeup appliances of past chapters, building the story around a cast of photoreal CG simians convincing enough to identify with as characters, rather than just special effects. Though markedly better than 2001's Tim Burton reboot, this apocalyptic entry has a trickier road ahead, relying on positive buzz and sheer spectacle to win over skeptical auds.

When the first "Planet of the Apes" movie bowed in 1968, Fox's cynical projection of man's future came riding on a wave of nuclear alarmism, arriving just as the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The political context underlined the allegorical power of the Pierre Boulle novel that inspired it, raising the question as to whether somewhere in the universe a species more responsible than Man might exist.

Today, everyone knows the twist -- that the topsy-turvy world the astronauts have returned to was Earth all along -- which is the key element screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have carried over from the earlier movies, apart from a couple lines recycled for inside-joke appeal (e.g., "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"). While the film's stock characters and generic story components don't feel especially fresh, the technical elements are so cutting edge that the film could not have existed in such polished form before now.

Working with actor Andy Serkis and Weta Digital, Wyatt advances the art of motion capture to the point that all of the film's key animal characters -- which include dozens of chimps, a sage old orangutan and one incredibly temperamental gorilla -- demonstrate incredibly detailed personalities that no trained monkey or ape-suited actor possibly could have conveyed.

The real triumph is Caesar, who will grow up to become the Che Guevara of chimps over the course of the film. So nuanced and specific is Serkis' performance that his digital avatar shows far greater emotional range than any of his human co-stars, even without the aid of dialogue, a coup without which the film's central leap of faith -- that auds would connect so deeply with Caesar they wouldn't mind witnessing the annihilation of their own species -- could have been a disastrous gamble.

Created in the same downer spirit as the recent "Terminator" prequels, "Rise" rewrites "Apes" lore to provide an alternate history for mankind's extinction, brought about by genetic testing rather than atomic irresponsibility.

On the live-action side, a charismatic James Franco plays Will Rodman, a San Francisco research scientist with a personal stake in trying to find the cure for Alzheimer's. His father (John Lithgow) suffers from the disease, and Will thinks he's found a cure in a serum that his employer, Gen-Sys, has been testing on chimpanzees. When one of the test subjects goes ape-wild, the company shuts down the program, forcing Will to violate two major ethical rules: First he takes home the infant Caesar, who has been treated with the formula, and then he carries on testing the unapproved drug on his own dad.

In the background, a rocket takes off aimed for Mars, ostensibly carrying the series' Charlton Heston/Mark Wahlberg character onboard, while events on Earth veer toward the cataclysmic. Considering how explicit earlier "Apes" installments were about their politics, "Rise" seems more than a little confused about the statement it wants to make. The film lets Will off the hook for engineering a deadly virus with the potential to wipe out mankind, while focusing blame on his Wall Street-minded boss (David Oyelowo), whose greed allows the animal testing to continue.

The story is angled such that we identify with Caesar and view every human character except those directly invested in his well-being -- namely Will, his father and veterinarian girlfriend (Freida Pinto) -- as deserving of the fate that awaits them. Most loathsome are the cruel and unusual animal-control officers (Brian Cox and Tom Felton) who tear Caesar away from his human family, turning "Rise" into a sort of simian "Shawshank Redemption" as the chimp plots his escape (which might explain why "The Escapist's" Wyatt got the directing gig).

Patrick Doyle's insistent score clearly sympathizes with the pic's climactic ape uprising, memorably staged on the Golden Gate Bridge. "Rise" was made at considerable expense, and the results shows at all levels of the production, with few shortcuts taken in scenes that combine CG and live-action elements.

Review: `Apes' is big, ridiculous summer fun 

Silly humans. We're so arrogant. We see a cute, cuddly baby chimp, assign all kinds of familiar characteristics to it and raise it with the loving playfulness we'd give our own children, only to find that the creature's unpredictable and ferocious animal nature wins out in the end.
If the documentary "Project Nim" didn't serve as enough of a warning for us earlier this summer, now we have the blockbuster "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," which is sort of a prequel and sort of a sequel and sort of a reboot. Mainly, it's a spectacle. Except for a couple of cute nods to the 1968 Charlton Heston original, "Rise" pretty much functions as its own stand-alone entity.
Sure, it might be trying to teach us a lesson about hubris, provide some insight into the darker elements of human nature we'd rather not acknowledge. But mostly it's about angry, `roided-up chimps clambering across cars on the Golden Gate Bridge, giving a hairy smackdown to the outmatched California Highway Patrol officers who are foolish enough to stand in their way. The second you see cops arriving on horseback in a futile attempt at keeping the peace, you just know that one of these primates is going to end up climbing into the saddle and unleashing hell, most likely in slow motion.
This is not a complaint, mind you. This seventh film in the "Planet of the Apes" series rises to such ridiculous heights, it's impossible not to laugh out loud — in a good way, in appreciation. There's big, event-movie fun to be had here, amped up by some impressive special effects and typically immersive performance-capture work by Andy Serkis, best known as Gollum from the "Lord of the Rings" films.
But the idea that director Rupert Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver truly had anything serious in mind seems rather disingenuous. There's a thin layer of philosophical substance draped over a muscular action picture. The third act makes that clear.
At first, though, James Franco is toiling away stoically as Will Rodman, a scientist at a San Francisco-based pharmaceutical company who is doing genetic research in hopes of finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. His quest is personal: His once-brilliant father (John Lithgow in the film's few subtle scenes) suffers from the affliction.
When trouble with one of the test chimps necessitates putting all of them down, Will sneaks home a baby that's secretly just been born. (Seriously? Nobody noticed a newborn chimp?) He's got some of the new drug in him, which makes him a quick learner; since he's clearly bound for great things, he's given the name Caesar.
As in "Project Nim" — and they would make a no-brainer of a double feature — Caesar grows big and strong, wears clothes, learns sign language and becomes part of the family. At the same time, Will has been testing out the new drug on his dad, who is also showing signs of improvement. Over the years, Will has fallen in love with the gorgeous veterinarian who treated Caesar as a baby (Freida Pinto, who's called on to look pretty and not much else). Everything's humming along nicely.
But, of course, since this is a CHIMP we're talking about, things get out of hand and Caesar must be sent away. Thankfully, there's a primate shelter nearby in San Bruno (what are the odds?). Brian Cox runs the place with sinister facial hair, and with Tom Felton — Draco Malfoy from the "Harry Potter" movies — playing his son, you know these can't be warmhearted guys. Wyatt builds tension in these scenes by playing them as if they were the central part of a prison drama, and watching Caesar manipulate his fellow chimps to wrest control is a hoot.
Serkis is so intense and committed to the role, you can't help but feel some empathy for Caesar, for his frustration and confusion. The effects are especially crisp when "Apes" focuses just on him, or on his seamless interaction with one or two humans or a couple of other chimps. It's the big set pieces that form the film's climax — as dozens of chimps scamper over hills and through city streets, into the zoo to free their brethren and eventually across that famous bridge — that things start to look distractingly fake and jerky.
But hey, at least they aren't flinging themselves at us in 3-D. Then things would get really hairy.
"Rise of the Planet of the Apes," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 for intense and frightening sequences of action and violence. Running time: 105 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/03/entertainment/e135257D03.DTL#ixzz1U1Rl5AwR

Entertainment Weekly

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman | Aug 03, 2011

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A few years ago, I went to see the original Planet of the Apes (1968) at a revival theater, and I was shocked by how cheesy it now looked on the big screen. The sprawling adobe ape village came off like something out of late-'60s Disneyland — it looked just like what it was, a set — and the caves where Charlton Heston was caged might have been made of Styrofoam. But though the physical production had dated badly (apart from the ape makeup, which was still anthropomorphically cool), the film had lost none of its pop audacity, its topsy-turvy post-apocalyptic racial-allegorical pow (''You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!''). None of the four Apes sequels, of course, were nearly as good, but they still carried bits and pieces of the original's trippy extravagance, and they were an early landmark of geek culture. (When I was 14, a friend and I watched Escape From the Planet of the Apes on TV and then spent what felt like three hours trying to make sense of its timeline.)

All of which is to say that the biggest disappointment of the halfhearted, digitally impersonal Rise of the Planet of the Apes, apart from how just-okay it is in almost every way, is that the grandeur is gone. The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 Planet of the Apes remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to — it's just an apes-on-the-rampage creature feature, with a decent setup, a wobbly second act, and a glorified-videogame urban-action-war payoff. The apes, in this case, look realistic if a bit rubbery and are led by one very, very shrewd chimpanzee named Caesar (a nod to the Roddy McDowall character in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes). He's played, deftly, by Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that turns the actor who was Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films into a scowling-eyed, mostly silent humanoid chimp so slow-burn angry that he's almost handsome. Think of him as the Daniel Craig of higher primates.

Caesar, as the result of a corporate lab experiment, has been enhanced by ALZ-112, a brain-activating serum invented by Bay Area geneticist Will Rodman (James Franco) as a cure for Alzheimer's. The stuff really works (Will tries it out on his mentally disintegrating father, played by John Lithgow), and it also makes chimps as smart as humans. When one of the apes that Will was experimenting on goes berserk, shutting down the project, Will takes home that chimp's offspring — Caesar — who, it turns out, was born with his advanced intellect. Caesar still has an apish desire to swing through trees and attic rafters, and to bite things. If anything, his prehensile prowess is only heightened by his superior mind. For a while, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a Bedtime for Bonzo buddy movie played straight, and Franco, though he's not very effective when he has to spout deep-think ''scientific'' gibberish (he doesn't act it so much as recite it), does make a convincingly cuddly ape daddy.

Caesar, chafing at his status as a quasi-pet, finally goes berserk himself, biting off a pesky neighbor's finger, and he's then sent to an ape shelter that's basically a prison. This is where the movie sags — and also where it starts to get a bit silly, as in a scene where Caesar and a circus orangutan sign to each other in subtitles. (I half expected the next two lines to be: ''Did you see Jersey Shore last night?'' ''Oh, man, what animals!'') For a while, the movie cheats the fact that none of these apes have been enhanced by AZL-112 (there's an instantly campy scene where the apes in a zoo all rise, in unison, simply at Caesar's mystical presence). But it finally devises a cheap way to get around it: They get dosed with the stuff at the last minute, so that Caesar can then lead an uprising of the oppressed. Power to the apes! Only what are they so mad about? That they live in zoos? The ballooning deficit? They're angry because the movie needs them to go wild in the streets.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is really one long lead-in to its set pieces: apes trashing downtown San Francisco, chimps slithering up the Golden Gate Bridge (a terrific image), gorillas tossing manhole covers at cop cars and leaping off the bridge into a helicopter. The movie's supposed to be a cautionary tale, but it barely bothers to think out what it's being cautionary about. These apes may be smart, but with the exception of Caesar, they're really just effects. They never make you wonder who the maniacs are.


B-

Audacious, violent and disquieting, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is a summer sequel that’s better than it has any right to be. This movie about how the apes rose up against the humans who would trap them, cage them and use them in medical experiments is a stunning job of back-engineering the familiar “Planet of the Apes” story and another leap forward in performance capture animation.

As alarming and sometimes bloody as it is, “Rise” still doesn’t require that “No apes were harmed in the making of this movie” credit. They’re all digital, a performance capture cast led by Andy Serkis (Gollum in “Lord of the Rings”) that is so convincing as to render every earlier ape “Planet” movie camp. Not that they weren’t already.


“Rise” tells the story of Caesar, the son of a smart chimpanzee made even smarter by a viral serum given to him by a scientist, Dr. Will Rodman (James Franco) in pursuit of a cure for his father’s (John Lithgow) Alzheimer’s disease. When the corporate boss (David Oyelowo) decides the current test-crop of apes is “contaminated” and must be “put down,” Will takes Caesar home and raises him as one of the family. Dad gives him the name Caesar. And when Caesar’s intelligence shows, Will gives Dad the drug and seemingly cures his degenerative brain disease.


Early scenes of Caesar gamboling through the rafters of their big, old San Francisco two-story are reminiscent of Disney’s animated “Tarzan,” long swooping takes of the chimp swinging, clambering, leaping and frolicking. When Will meets a cute and sympathetic zoo vet (Freida Pinto) they even take Caesar to the Muir Woods park to climb the redwoods. But Caesar is still a wild, impulsive and sometimes violent animal, prone to escape and annoy the neighbors. And the vet has a word of warning.
“I love chimpanzees. I’m also afraid of them. It’s appropriate to be afraid of them.”



Serkis, the king of motion capture acting, gives Caesar a cautious physicality and a wary hooded stare. And the animators capture the glint of intelligence in his eyes. The film’s first electric moment is a glance between doctor and ape as the now adult Caesar sees and understands, the instant Will does, that his father is regressing back into Alzheimer’s.


Director Rupert Wyatt stages the film’s second half — Caesar’s imprisonment in a “primate shelter” — with prison movie verve, letting us imagine how he will establish himself in his cell block and how he might state his coup de chimp.


“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” uses standard issue animal care cliches that are exactly the same as those in “Zookeeper” — from the sexy veterinarian to the cruel zookeepers (Tom Felton and Brian Cox).
But it’s clever enough to summon up memories of Pierre Boulle’s Vietnam War era sci-fi novel and make you ponder it as moral and racial parable. And it’s so brilliantly executed as to render the original version of this sequel-prequel in  the  apes epic  (1972’s  “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”) laughable, and Tim Burton’s handsome remake of the original “Planet of the Apes” utterly forgettable.