Rise up, or end up as one of their pets, why don't you
dir: Rupert Wyatt
Never has humanity’s downfall been so enjoyable or well-deserved.
Really, could it be a spoiler? Does anyone whose interest perks up at the elaboration on the title not know that, at some point, there’s this Planet, and it’s going to be Of The Apes? That there was a book about it, and a film about it with Charlton “My Hands Are Cold and Dead Now” Heston, and a bunch of other films to lesser success, and then Mark Wahlberg appeared on the scene to fuck things up?
And he wasn’t even playing an ape? How inexplicable is that?
Otherwise, the title wouldn’t resonate, and presumably, the multitudes wouldn’t care. Nah, what we craved, without knowing it, is an explanation; a grounded, believable explanation as to how the Apes came to ‘own’ our Planet, and what ‘we’, being arrogant, hubristic humans, did to allow them to take over.
Lest it sound like I’m being sarcastic as a prelude to ripping the utter shit out of this flick, let me stave off any confusion by bluntly stating the following: this is one of the best big budget flicks of the year. It works on an action level, it works (I can’t believe I’m typing this) emotionally, and it works conceptually as well. I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece, because it’s fairly familiar in plenty of ways. The brilliant aspect is the parts of the flick devoted to Caesar’s rise to power amongst his ape brethren as they get ready to become the dominant primates on the planet.
Yep, the monkeys don’t get shit in this equation. Once the humans are dealt with, anything with a tail will probably be reduced to the status of Lithuanians.
Let me be even more hyperbolic in relation to this flick: it’s so well done, and the CGI creating the apes of the flick, especially Caesar, being so strong these days, that this flick makes up for all the bad monkey flicks ever to have come out. One specific scene I can think of, towards the end of the flick involving a very pissed-off silverback gorilla and a helicopter, not only made me forgive Peter Jackson’s bloated, pustulant King Kong, but it even managed the unthinkable feat of getting revenge for the King Kong of the original story on humanity. Take that, puny humans!
Let me go even further. If there was any justice in this world; if the Academy Awards meant anything, Caesar would be nominated for Best Actor at next year’s Oscars. Seriously. I can’t even formulate in my head as to who would actually receive the award, since Caesar doesn’t exist in the corporeal world, and though you’d think it’d go to the man in the motion capture suit (being Andy Serkis, again pulling duty as someone with a face Hollywood doesn’t think you should have to endure), you could argue the award deserves to go as much to the programmers who give Caesar those incredibly expressive, uh, expressions. And no-one wants to see any of the aforementioned people up on a stage, or in public, or in a well-lit area.
Oh, yeah, and there are some humans in this story as well. Silly humans. They make the classic mistake of all Hollywood scientists in that they have the gall and the temerity to dream of healing human diseases. Because, you see, in movies, any attempt to create a cure to anything, unless it’s Lorenzo’s Oil’s parents, invariably results in the destruction of humanity and/or the creation of monstrous mutants, vampires or Mormons.
Not very supportive, Hollywood. We’d all be living in huts and healing each other with witch doctory if it was up to all of you. What price progress, eh?
Of course, the motives of the ostensible lead, Professor Frink (James Franco) is that he’s looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s. You know, just like the Poindexters in Deep Blue Sea who were trying to create a cure for Alzheimer’s by creating super intelligent sharks.
And how did that work out for those geniuses? Human sushi, that’s how it turned out.
It’s a slight difference here, but it’s the actual proposed cure that accidentally has the effect of raising the intelligence of chimps experimented on until they’re way smarter than the people experimenting on them. A female ape called Bright Eyes is the star pupil of the drug trials, and she, of course, goes berserk, but not before giving birth to a gorgeous widdle cutie pie they eventually call Caesar.
Whatever changes the drug wrought occurred in utero, so Caesar’s also an argument either for or against unintentional genetic engineering. It’s almost like Art hates Science or something, considering the continued grief.
We watch Caesar grow from smart baby to brilliant ape child, to sullen teenager, to prison lifer, to Spartacus- rebel general. And what a character arc it is. I cannot believe how believable they make it. It seems facile even to write it, but this flick’s sublime achievement is in getting us to appreciate the journey that Caesar is on, one told mostly without any words at all, though he does know sign language.
When he gets put in the clink for defending one of his surrogate parental figures, Caesar is downtrodden by his sadistic human handlers, and picked on by the other apes. There are a lot of apes in this facility. You’ve got the orang-utans from the Clint Eastwood Any Which Way But Loose human/simian buddy pictures, you’ve got other chimps from films with the lesser members of the Friends cast, and the rejected, unloved gorilla from Mighty Joe Young. Basically, every Hollywood ape that’s ever outstayed its welcome, and has grown past the cute Macauley Culkin in Home Alone stage of cuteness, has been sequestered here to live out their days in a squalid prison. Their only hope of escape comes from the possibility that one of the tougher apes will beat them to death and feast on their entrails, or that they might get experimented upon by the nice scientists at Gen-Sys, the ‘evil’ company Professor Frink worked for from the start, where the super monkey brain serum was first and lastly developed.
During his first day in the yard, Caesar is singled out, because he’s got a natty sweater on, and, perhaps because of his obvious super-intelligence, he is perceived as a bit of a nerd. Naturally, ape prison dynamics being awfully similar to human schoolyard group dynamics, the other apes try to bully the fuck out of him. But they really don’t know how smart he is, and how long-term his ultimate plan is.
It’s not freedom from incarceration that Caesar craves: it’s emancipation for all his great ape brethren from the shackles of ignorance.
Revolutions have started over less. People forget that the October Revolution started over an argument regarding a half-empty bottle of vodka and a pair of shapely patent leather boots with a nice Cuban heel. And look where that got the Russian peasantry: up history’s shit creek and starved or worked to death without a paddle, with the fucking Lithuanians still looking on with envy.
It’s tremendously well handled. I can’t stress enough how I marvelled at how the story went down, especially how this element of the core of the story was developed and realised. When you find yourself both dreading and cheering the apes in their endeavours against their human oppressors, you know they (being the filmmakers) have found the alchemical way to put it all together so that you care (insofar as anyone can ‘care’ about a flick whose title ends with “Of the Apes”) and can enjoy what’s happening. Caesar is such an expressive, noble, badass character that I found it impossible to not hinge all my hopes on his success.
Lest it sound like I’m championing humanity’s downfall like some Christian evangelical fundamentalist or something, don’t get your special Mormon underwear in a bunch. The apes rise in parallel with our downfall in this flick, with the latter being as a result of human stupidity rather than ape ruthlessness.
After all, I don’t want people as attractive as Frida Pinto (who plays the calm, rational “you shouldn’t be playing God” role for the flick) and James Franco to die and be replaced with only moderately attractive apes, but who am I to stand in the way of ape progress? They earned it; they paid their dues, and they wanted it more. You’ve got to give the props for that, at the very least.
It culminates in a very well staged action sequence on that most famous of cinematic sluts, being the Golden Gate Bridge. That shameless hussy of a bridge gives it up for any filmmaker with a hefty enough roll of cash, and she gives it up here as well, as humans try to take a last stand against these creatures despite having no real reason to. It’s so well done, even if I can’t really tell you how plausible it all is. After all, that bay is notorious for its convenient fog, and these are very intelligent super-apes.
For me, thus far, this has been the most successful and enjoyable of the action flicks of the current American summer. It stands and looms way above, casting its hairy shadow over all the mindless superheroic blather that this year has excreted out onto our collective eyeballs. It hardly matters that it’s that most cliché of science fiction cautionary tales: that all Science not devoted to feeding Orphans is pure Hubris and eventually kills Everyone. It hardly matters because, really, who doesn’t enjoy watching a decent revolution? Smart Apes Unite!
8 times Caesar’s first words sent a tremendous chill down my spine out of 10
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“Oh my God, I was wrong. It was Earth all along.”
“Well you finally made a monkey, yes you finally made a monkey”
“You finally made a monkey out of me” – humanity’s less-than-finest moment in the musical version of Planet of the Apes
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