It is not a box-office smash as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. It is not well-praised as The Tree of Life. And it is not highly budgeted as Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But my favorite 2011 movie so far is Rise of the Planet of the Apes. What can I do? I am a sci-tech film fanatic. Rise is a creepy, sci-tech thriller, making you root for the feisty apes and reprove the errant humans.
The movie is another of those films dealing with the theme of man’s arrogance and ignorance of others that lead to his doom. However, something is concocted in the film that breaks the mold from other sci-tech flicks – compassion. That is, man also cares for others despite his being unscrupulous. He also knows that sometimes if things have gone awry, he needs to stop and think about what he has done. This is the relationship portrayed in the characters of Will Rodman (James Franco) and Caesar (Andy Serkis), the ape. Caesar is a product of Rodman’s ALZ 12 experiment, but instead of abandoning his test subject, he adopts the creature and treats him as his own child. That is why Rodman always calls himself as “your father” and never treats Caesar as a pet. The bonding is even strengthened when the doctor introduces him to his dad Dodge Landon (John Lithgow), fiancee Caroline Aranha (Freida Pinto), and the Red Woods.
The conflict is not about Rodman’s scientific breakthrough but greed as seen in Robert Franklin (Tyler Labine) and Gen X Sys that “invest in results, not dreams”. Their results are also their demise in the hands of a new breed of simians that they created.
Director Rupert Wyatt and his writers handle the story well by interfacing the prequel with the original Planets of the Apes (1968). In Rise, apes in cages stretch out one of their arms with palm up to beg for sugary food. In Planet, it is the humans enacting it. In the prequel, the simians are mistreated by John Landon (Tom Felton), dousing them with water from a hose and shouting “It’s a madhouse!” In the original, it is American astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) who is splashed with water while exclaiming “It’s a mad house!” I suggest that after watching Rise, immediately view Planet and you will appreciate more the prequel and see the strange “upside-down evolution”.
Interested more about apes in fiction films? Then visit:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8375421/whos_who_of_apes_in_fiction_films.html?cat=40