I’m an Apeophile.
That’s what people call fans of the Planet of the Apes movie series, and it’s a crappy name. It’s worse than “Trekkie” as a descriptive term – that could be considered derogatory by some fans, but at least its descriptive and indicative. “Apeophile?” Not so much. And in this fetishistic day and age, it could be interpreted in ways that… well, aren’t flattering or helpful.
Nonetheless, and whatever term you deem to use, I’m a fan of these movies. They are high-grade B-pictures that are entertaining and also dare to tell stories that have sad, bad endings. Heck, the second movie ended with the Earth blowing up. They still hold up, 30 years later.
When I heard that there was going to be yet another Planet of the Apes movie, I was trepidatous. I had gotten my hopes up a decade previous, when the first word that Tim Burton was making a new Apes remake… a movie that fans of the series like to pretend never really happened. So, as the saying goes… once bitten, twice shy.
I shouldn’t have worried, because Rise of the Planet of the Apes is one of the remarkable wonders of this year – a movie that is absolutely aligned with the tone of the original films and yet one that is completely modern and entertaining in its own right.
I won’t go into the details of the plot because, well, I’m lazy… and if you want plot summaries, you can go to wikipedia. I will spend time focused on some key aspects I found noteworthy. First I have to applaud the work of the great Andy Serkis as Caesar. This movie, like the last three of the originals, need a strong actor in the lead role of the lead Ape. The late great Roddy McDowall was Cornelius, then Caesar in those movies, and Serkis is more than a match in his take at the character. At this point I nominate Serkis to play every main character in every new movie from now on. Even through the veil of motion capture technology, his acting shines through.
The second key thing I appreciate was how the filmmakers were bold enough to transition Casear to the main character of the film in the second act. The safe move would have been to continue to focus on the character played by James Franco, the “father” of Caesar. They didn’t do that. In a move similar to what Hitchcock did in Psycho, they shift focus to Casear and it could have failed completely if the effects and the acting didn’t work. Thankfully, it did, and the movie works far better than I expected it to be. We CARE about Caesar, and the pathos surrounding his birth and life makes him a character we root for. A remarkable achievement.
Finally, the thing I liked the most is that they had numerous references to the original films, but these were not slavish fan service references that distorted the story for a minority audience – they were grace notes, little touches that made long time fans smile but would not get in the way for the average moviegoer.
So, in summary: it’s a fine piece of entertainment, well done and a worthy addition to the pantheon of summer films and Ape flicks. Much more than the aforementioned Burton film…