My immediate impression as the credits of this film started rolling was that it was a great genre film, but it wasn’t a Planet of the Apes film.
I understand that sounds like a fairly unnuanced reaction, but it’s been three years and nothing has made me feel appreciably different about the film. I admire its audacity, I admire the way it’s written, I admire all the shockingly great performances. We’ll get to all those in a moment. But as we’ve been spending a week now talking about the Planet of the Apes franchise, it feels like the place to start is to talk about where this film fits in to that franchise, and for me the answer is I just really don’t think it does.
That’s not really a bad thing. I understand it sounds like one, and I understand why it sounds that way, but it’s not. It’s just something I want to acknowledge right off the bat. Is the plot loosely based on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes? Sure. Is Caesar (Andy Serkis) basically the same character he was in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes? To an extent. Is it possible I’m being hypersensitive about what makes a “Planet of the Apes” film because of my admiration for the original films?
… yeah, probably.
Honestly, though, I think the best explanation for the development of the ape civilization was the original one, which ended up not even being canon in those films. Humans blew ourselves up with our tools of war, evolution took its course, and we ended up beneath another species on the totem pole with only ourselves to blame. Those are the broad strokes of what the first film implied, and it was largely done away with by the sequels from Escape from the Planet of the Apes onward, but we actually got hints of it in Caesar’s speech at the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and we indeed do find that the human race has been laid low by nuclear war between that film and Battle of the Planet of the Apes, even if the emergence of the ape civilization wasn’t quite as clean as the first film implied.1
Failing that, I don’t mind the revolutionary overtones of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and the implication that Caesar sort of jump started the process of evolution. The exact mechanism of this is a bit vague, and potentially frustrating for modern audiences, but I’m honestly more okay with that than what we get in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Because I really don’t need the great ape civilization to have been created in a science lab as part of an overly ambitious attempt to cure Alzheimer’s disease. And although the film (thankfully) doesn’t really “go there,” it’s pretty easy to get some, “See? Be careful with all that science!” finger waving out of that origin story.
Worse, the ending credits scene strongly implies (and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes more or less confirms) that the nuclear war that even the Conquest/Battle continuity preserved didn’t happen, and the human race was basically brought low by a nightmarish viral pandemic. Well, thanks for removing a huge chunk of the cautionary message about the folly of humanity. I’m sure we didn’t need that.
On the level of personal frustration that’s really probably a bit more indulgent than I’m entirely comfortable with, my last real complaint in terms of this not being a “Planet of the Apes movie” is that I will fully admit I liked the tacky costumes and verbal speech. The speech is the more important element to me. I understand it looks silly and modern audiences are less likely to accept it. I understand that in a lot of ways it’s actually pretty groovy that we’re in a place where audiences are more okay with sign language with subtitles than with apes talking like humans. And I understand that this is part of the film’s focus on making the apes more “realistic.”2 I also fully admit, as I did at the beginning of this paragraph, that this is absolutely a personal concern that has no real impact whatsoever on the quality of this film. It’s completely a matter of personal preference, and just something I wanted to get off my chest. Cool? Cool.
But hey, remember that funny thing I said yesterday about how an adaptation doesn’t really need to be too faithful to its source material to be a good film? I gave plenty of examples yesterday, but here’s another one: Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
So while everyone else is trying to bend over backwards to show why this film definitely fits in with the spirit and execution of the previous films, and as much as I admire the previous films, I’m coming from a completely different place: I don’t care.
Okay, that’s not completely true. Obviously I care quite a bit, otherwise I wouldn’t have just rambled on for a page and a half about the subject, but here’s the real difference. I see absolutely no tension between my two reactions to this film: “This was not a Planet of the Apes movie” and “This was a really, really good movie.”
Yesterday, I argued the reason Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes sucked wasn’t because it was “unfaithful” to the source material, it sucked because… it sucked. It was terrible. It was lacking in nearly every department. Here, we have the proverbial other side of the coin. While everyone’s doing mental gymnastics to try to convince themselves this was a more faithful adaptation, I see no need to do so because I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that it wasn’t.
You know what it was? Incredibly well-written and well-directed, for one thing. Rather than trying to cram everything into some kind of epic conflict narrative like Burton’s writers tried to do, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver’s script centers the movie around relationships. And they actually weren’t afraid to shift the focus of the narrative in unconventional ways when it became necessary to do so. The most obvious example being who this movie is “about” changes dramatically from the beginning to the end.
The star in the early going is clearly James Franco as Will, and that’s definitely not a bad direction to go when you have a motivated James Franco on your project. And the driving force was his relationship with his father Charles (played John Lithgow, whom I never suspected of having serious chops like this), who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. There are all sorts of obstacles during the early going. A boss (David Oyelowo) who initially seems conservative and holds him back, but who will later be revealed to be greedy as all get-out when the plot needs him to be antagonistic in other ways.3 Lack of approval for human trials. The ruthless euthanizing of all his chimpanzee test subjects after an incident at the lab. You know, the usual.
And at that low point we meet Caesar, the remarkable chimpanzee that will become one of Will’s most important relationships in the film, before later actually seizing the reins of the narrative for himself and never giving them back. Early on, it’s all about Caesar’s relationship with Will and Charles. Eventually, Caroline (Freida Pinto) comes into the picture, and they all just end up hopelessly attached to Caesar. We see the little guy grow up through really well-crafted montages and well-handled time jumping, and it’s all held together by the aforementioned great writing as well as some exceptionally confident directing. It seriously boggles the mind that this was one of only three films Rupert Wyatt directed. He just seems to have an innate understanding of what every single scene needs, how to get it, and did I mention he kept James Franco motivated for an entire movie while playing a straightforward, earnest character? I mean, damn.
And if you need more proof, look at the seismic shift in the middle of this movie he got the audience to accept. After a truly harrowing incident between Caesar and Will’s neighbor,4 Will is forced by a court order to place Caesar in custody at a primate shelter. And as soon as the gate locks behind him, the narrative irretrievably belongs to Caesar. Maybe it helps that they spent so much of the film together, but how often have you seen a film successfully change who the protagonist is halfway through without it bothering you?
And here’s where I have to take a minute to talk about how brilliant Andy Serkis is.
Do you want to give me a single example of a motion-capture actor who has ever done a better job of acting than Serkis did in this film? I might prefer the more human-appearing/acting apes in the original films, but I’m still stunned by how effectively this film brought a computer-animated character to life. I’ve never seen it done better. And he’s so distinct, and the way he asserts himself as the alpha of the sanctuary just makes you “buy” him as a leader so completely. It’s just a staggeringly good, boundary-pushing performance.
And hey, while we’re here, as much justifiable praise as Serkis got for this performance in critical circles, let’s not forget all the computer animators that made this happen. It’s just so exciting for the medium, and I really don’t want to understate this. I don’t think it’s possible to watch this (and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and not admit that the ceiling of computer-animated characters might well be just as high as characters played by humans.
So, you know. Just a well-written, confidently directed, superbly acted, smart, boundary-pushing film that may have redefined the ceiling of an entire aspect of filmmaking. I guess it was okay.
Footnotes
1. This gets us into some interesting territory about what’s “canon” in a given film. I actually have no doubt that in the minds of the first film’s writers, this is exactly what happened, and only the demand for further sequels changed “what happened.” So, there was a period of time from 1968 to 1971 that it was “true” for the writers and audience that this was how the ape civilization came into existence, but thanks to Escape from the Planet of the Apes that isn’t what “happened” anymore. Even thought it totally was at one point, it just wasn’t directly stated, allowing the later alteration. All of this is basically to say… canon is funny.
2. Though, why we’re worrying about that in the first place in a film about monkeys taking over the planet kind of gets to my original point that this isn’t really a Planet of the Apes film.
3. This might sound a bit clumsy and convenient on paper, but it actually works great on screen and feels pretty organic. It’s not really cheating. His wants and needs as a character aren’t actually changing, just being revealed for what they really are at a convenient time.
4. Who is played brilliantly,by the way, by David Hewlett, whom you may recognize as the antagonistic Dr. McKay from Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. What a fantastic bit of casting. That guy is brilliant at playing assholes.
Cinematic Justice 