Planet of the Fist-Bumps

* * 1/2  (out of five)  Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Written by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver. Directed by Rupert Wyatt.

 Given that people are almost genetically identical to chimps and bonobos, it’s only a terminological fig-leaf that keeps biologists from classifying us all as apes. Planet Earth already is “Planet of the Apes”—a fact literally upheld in that famous “kicker” ending of the 1968 film, with a wrecked Lady Liberty sticking of the sand, Ozymandias style, before a prostrate Charlton Heston. Though it was broadly based on a middling science fiction novel by Pierre Boulle, the real authorship of that film lay with co-screenwriter Rod Serling, who (along with Michael Wilson) injected ideas he had explored regularly in The Twilight Zone. One of these was the ongoing struggle to make people, despite their most atavistic urges, somehow more humane. The title was Planet of the Apes, but the real subject was the unfinished struggle to become human.

           Now, in the contemporary spirit of leaving no franchise behind, we are presented with yet another reboot of the Apes story. After the execrable 2001 Tim Burton-Mark Wahlberg version almost sank the whole thing, the makers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes have picked it up, dusted it off, and returned to first principles. Director Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist) and screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver present what is essentially a mash-up of ideas from the original movie series, borrowing mostly from numbers one and four (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes). Here, a research biologist Will Rodman (James Franco) is hard at work inventing a drug to cure Alzheimer’s. But his father (John Lithgow) is already fading away from the disease, leaving Rodman with no time procedural niceties. When he tests his nerve-generating drug on a chimp, the result is “Caesar”, a brainy ape with some very bleak social prospects, given the fact he is unique. How he contrives to give himself equally smart company is the essence of the apes’ “rise”.

            Long story short, this is a big improvement over Tim Burton and Markie Mark, but it still ain’t Rod Serling.  Visually, it is as seamless as we expect a modern product, with the wholly CGI Caesar looking more or less convincing, interacting plausibly with Franco, Lithgow and the others (yawn). No actors in preposterous latex masks here, folks--though in truth these digitized apes seem a bit too ideal, too bloodless. For the fans, Wyatt et al. give us riffs on classic lines from the originals, including droll variations on “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” and “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” Along with the Apes films, the inspiration for Rise surely lies in the prison escape genre, with the canned simians learning begrudging respect for each other as they rage against the Man. By the end, we almost expect Caesar to fist-bump his comrades.

            The script is round and sturdy, if not very exciting, like one of those ape tree-houses from the original movie. In perhaps its weakest element, the climax depicts the apes battling to get across a certain orange bridge to get to…where, exactly? Marin County? It is scarcely a spoiler to note that Muir Woods, with Pacific coast redwoods that African and Asian apes would never, ever lay eyes on, is a poor candidate for the future site of Ape City. The projected loss of admissions fees alone would obligate the Park Service to go nuclear to protect it.

            Watching Rise, I was reminded less of the original Ape movies than the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek. Like the latter, Rise takes full advantage of Hollywood imagineering to make an old show seem fresh and exciting. But in the process, all the Big Ideas—in this case, the Serling-esque musings over the nature of man, of the ironies of evolution and history—have been drained out. For example, in the original film the apes portray themselves as somehow ethically superior to the humans they’ve displaced. Along the way, Serling and Co. have a lot of fun puncturing the simians’ moral conceit—the apes, just like us, still like to grin in trophy shots of the prey they’ve ruthlessly hunted down. (At one point, in a scene almost unimaginable in these conservative times, we even get a glimpse of an ape “pastor” giving a sermon full of self-aggrandizing religiosity about “God making Ape in His Own Image.”) Wyatt and Co., by contrast, just accept the apes’ supposed “humaneness” at face-value, having Caesar repeatedly stay the hands of his vengeful minions. So much for all those intriguing contradictions.

            Or compare the two human heroes of the films—Charlton Heston as “Taylor” in the original, James Franco here. Taylor encountered the apes for no other reason than because he was out exploring for “something that’s better than Man.” He’s a self-professed misanthrope, but by the end he discovers—the hard way—that he’s a humanist after all. James Franco, meanwhile, just wants to cure a disease. His only vice is an excess of zeal to help his Pop. That’s all well and good, but that’s the trouble—it’s just “well and good”. No principles are at stake here, and nothing is learned.

            Rise is better than what a million monkeys pounding on a million typewriters might produce by chance. But that still doesn’t make it Shakespeare.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro