Reflections on Rise of the Planet of the Apes
By Ivy Xerxes Glossopharyngeal
September 12, 2011Fall gives me one of those nostalgic feelings, especially the first morning you wake up and the air is crisp. Every year it is a positive life-altering experience. It's not one of those empty regretful nostalgias, but a vigorous robust feeling. I have the same emotion when I catch bits and pieces of the original Planet of the Apes (well, life-altering might be extreme, but I definitely want to keep watching). I'm a Planet of the Apes fan - in saying that I mean that I liked the first one with Charlton Heston because it had just the right sprinkling of fun campiness that makes it enjoyable - all the while maintaining a serious bent - but I also like a movie that makes me ponder my existence a little. It has everything. However, I've only seen parts of the sequels. Which means that any real diehard Apes fan probably thinks I'm a massive poser. But I contend that Planet of the Apes wasn't as ubiquitously popular as Star Wars - so if I said I was a Star Wars fan after only seeing the Empire Strikes Back, then maybe that same person would be justified. But I am an Apes fan from the perspective of the first movie and I can live with that. Someday, I'll sit down and watch them all through, but I have a feeling we are going to have a sequel to the one I just witnessed. So I might want to hold off until that happens. Methinks Hollywood might want to make some more money off it.
I'm a huge fan of the new movie because of the reason the writers concocted for the Apes' evolution. If you've only seen the original movie - the assumption is the Apes evolved over all those years it took for Heston's spaceship to land back onto earth. That it was a slow evolution for them to gain superior intelligence. And then they were able to eventually defeat the humans and subjugate them to slavery, maybe because the human's own decadence did them in. Or something like that. The new added wrinkle in this prequel that our biomedical technology spurred this evolution allowed this movie to be an epic snippet of that massive evolutionary upheaval. It's the difference between spilling your drink on a lazy Sunday afternoon to getting your drink knocked over in a fight.
Cesar has the perfect personality, (played by the guy who was Gollum in the Lord of the Rings) he's curious, empathetic, and doesn't know his own strength. He's a wonderful chimp, and when placed in the shelter suddenly starts doing a lot of grim stares like Al Pacino in Scarface.
Cesar's attachment to James Franco is anthropomorphism manifested into a real thing and heartwarming - the chimp intelligence equivalent of a purring cat on your lap (except the creepy scene where he is standing over their bed while they are sleeping. Imagine if you woke up to that, it would be more terrifying than this.) Anyway, it's a fascinating movie that makes you think about the implications of high intelligence in other beings, and makes you ponder our violent nature and how far removed from it we really might be (maybe not too far) - and shows a heart wrenching truth about what humans will do for the ones they love - Jon Voight plays a character with dementia so adroitly it makes all people from my generation, who see him in National Treasure and wonder why he originally won an academy award, go 'Oh...so he is an awesome actor.' It also makes you laugh several times and is just camp enough like the original one to do it justice. The line ‘Cesar…..is……Home' probably won't make you cry. And anything is better than this.
Biologists will have problem suspending their disbelief at the action of a virus that is so incredibly powerful that by the end Cesar was 6’ 2” and making a full sentence in English. Not sure we needed him to talk on that level in this movie. The NOOOOO was fine with me. The evolution of speech might have been better saved for the sequel. Maybe it's just me but I wasn't really as desperate for him to speak as the lady in the Child's Play movie was with Chucky.
There were even five viable ape characters in the movie – you had the Circus orangutan, the chimp that was leading the other chimps in the shelter (the one that looked like Joe Rogan) - the evil splotch marked chimp that ‘had been in a lab before’ with one eye bonked out (The scene where Jacobs is giddily watching as he scrawls ‘Jacobs’ on the window is great. Um, Jacobs, might not want to be too excited about that. That chimp with the old bungeye is clearly going to come kill you. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand why that chimp hated Jacobs. He had clearly been abused by humans, and possibly abused in a laboratory setting. But Jacobs didn’t really do that much to him. And we didn’t initially see that traumatic degeneration in his eye until later in the film. Which makes me think they cut out a scene where the evil splotchy chimp was half-heartedly doing the tower task, much to Jacobs frustration, until Jacobs loses it and stabs him in the eye with a pen and yells, ‘Faster!’ or something like that. Maybe it will be on the DVD extras. Jacobs was too nice to die. But I suppose in a revolution of this type – there has to be some casualties) - and you had the gorilla. With so many amazing plotlines laid out with the chimp characters, there needs to be a sequel. One of my coworkers pointed out that the sequel should revolve around why the apes have embraced clothes by the time Charlton Heston lands back on the planet. He suggests that the splotchy evil chimp has one testicle and assassinates Cesar, before instituting a mandatory clothes rule. I definitely agree.
Some other sequel ideas:
1. Expanding on the no clothes idea - maybe some of the other chimps start wearing pants to swear allegiance to Cesar, who is the only one with any clothes on at the end of the movie- as he is still wearing that pair of dirty navy slacks when he climbs the redwood. Then Cesar decides to corner the textile market and run a sweatshop chimp clothes factory, consolidating power and lining his pockets at the same time before grabbing some comely clothed chick as his mate (Who happens to be one the evil splotchy chimp lusts after). Evil Splotchy chimp rebels, goes sans clothes and primal, and flips out, maybe gets the female back and the war is on - clothes vs. no clothes with Cesar eventually toppling Evil Splotchy in an epic chimp martial arts battle on top of Mount Rushmore (with lots of Al Pacino Scarface posing) Clothes are good, they are civilization.
2. The circus orangutan secures power with Cesar's blessing as Cesar ‘wants no more’ of the new chimp society, he retreats to the space house outside Denver with his new wife, a chimp that looks like Ann Hathaway – in fact, I think I might go as ‘Ann Hathaway Chimp’ for Halloween. The Orangutan turns the chimp world into a lawless land of bacchanalia, with a harem of chimps around him (motivated by the insecurity that he can’t actually procreate with them) while sitting on a throne like Jabba the Hut, even going so far as to maybe cryofreeze old Evil Splotchy. Evil Splotchy and Joe Rogan Chimp rebel, with Evil Splotchy dying at the hands of one of the orangutan’s drugged up henchmen in the process. Joe Rogan Chimp limps through the mountains like Bernardo O’Higgins and asks for Cesar’s help. Cesar hears the pleas in his new paradise while smoking a pipe on his deck in a ruby red robe.’ Then Cesar goes apeshit on the orangutan's ass.
3. Cesar starts to believe he has all kinds of enemies he doesn’t – the classic paranoid king like Pablo Escobar (well, maybe Pablo was justified in his paranoia). He starts ordering Evil Splotchy to randomly execute people and chimps to secure his power, not realizing that he’s killing innocents and not usurpers (all the while forcing them to wear uniforms with a picture of James Franco on them as a martyr of the fight) before a rebellious army led by Joe Rogan Chimp crashes the kingdom and takes him out in a wall of bullets (James Franco turns out to be still alive in a surprise appearance later in the film, living in a bunker in the woods, and unaffected by the virus. He tries to reason with Joe Rogan chimp, but becomes imprisoned - foreshadowing the human prisoners in the Charlton Heston version).
4. Cesar makes a quilt while all the other chimps sit around the fireside as he tells enchanting stories of his times with James Franco.
Anyway, unlike last year, when Inception muscled its way to take the championship of the best neuro related movie (unless you squeeze in Shutter Island, either way, DiCaprio took the neuro title), if you want to see one neuro related movie this year, check out Rise of Planet of the Apes instead of Limitless - the two main contenders. Unless Hollywood has a better one hidden in its cortex for the holiday season.
Rating: 10 Cherry Cokes!
