Film Review | Rise of the Planet Of the Apes

How do you make the perfect summer blockbuster?

Apparently, all you have to do is take what has worked many times in the past (in this case, six – yep, count them – Planet of the Apes films), you come up with a solid script that channels and even older genre precedent (in this case, Frankenstein)… you then populate the brew with a solid cast (James Franco, Frieda Pinto, John Lithgow and Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis as the head ape) and, as a final touch, you appoint a fresh, promising director to marshal the entire sci-fi symphony (Rupert Wyatt, for whom this is only a second feature but who has won international awards for his previous effort – 2008’s The Escapist).

Yes, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does rely on this careful placement of Hollywood ingredients to take off as well as it in fact does – the build-up is spot on and the action beats bounce perfectly at every turn – but actually making something decent out of the embers of a series that had not only sputtered out decades ago, but that also had its corpse paraded very publically thanks to a misjudged Tim Burton remake in 2001, is no mean feat.

In this reboot of the classic Charlton Heston-trademarked film series, the head human is the resolutely more cerebral Will Rodman (Franco), a scientist in the employ of a pharmaceutical company, who decides to confront his father (Lithgow)’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease by developing a cure for it… testing it on chimpanzees to disastrous effect.

After a female chimpanzee – who had been shot with an experimental dose of Will’s concoction – goes berserk at the lab, Will’s boss orders the extermination of all the test subjects.

Will, however, succeeds in sneaking in a baby chimp that the errant test subject had left behind, and decides to raise ‘Caesar’ (Serkis) with the help of his dad and newfound squeeze (Pinto) back home.

Needless to say, this doesn’t quite go as planned, and after Caesar is locked up in a ‘Primate Sanctuary’ run by father-son scumbag team John (Brian Cox) and Dodge Landon (Tom Felton – aka Draco Malfoy), he foments a plan to break all the other simian detainees out… with a little help from daddy’s special drug.

What lies behind the success of Wyatt can co’s reboot is the decision to collapse the sprawling pop culture behemoth that is the ‘Apes’ phenomenon into a universally digestible whole, by pulling off two simple tricks: make the time-tested ‘science playing God’ trope – an instant success since Frankenstein – as the main plot motor, while an extended ‘prison break’ set piece helps roll things along nicely.

Of course it has to be said that the effects work also helps usher the saga into the 21st century with panache: Andy Serkis, who helped motion-capture Lord of the Rings’s Gollum into existence, here endows Caesar with much-needed humanity and gravitas, so that you’re not likely to be fussed that the apes inevitably chew up quite a bit of screen time.