Movie: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I ran across this DVD in Goodwill yesterday, I didn't have it and haven't seen it, and I knew almost nothing about it so I brought it home. Turns out it's a "reboot" of the franchise, not really connected to any of the other movies in the PotA franchise(s). The premise here is new to this franchise, although very old in the history of movie-making: anti-Alzheimer's drug is accidentally given to a chimp, giving him near-human intelligence, making him very dangerous as a research subject or pet. He escapes, blah blah blah. You can guess the rest.

Which is the problem with this film. The bad guys are VERY BAD. The good guys are VERY GOOD. The chimps are conflicted, and turn against the bad men who have mistreated them. Well, duh.

I enjoy a good popcorn movie as much as the next guy (see "Rogue One") but when the dialog is as stilted as this ("Be careful with this chimp, he's special") and the plot is as obvious as this ("Flowers for Algernon," anyone?) and the special effects are as fakey-looking as this, well it takes me out of the enjoyment zone.

Why make a movie if the audience can guess the whole plot after ten minutes?

Unlike the other PotA films -- which put men in monkey suits -- of which there were, what, six or seven films in the original franchise, and one "remake" in 2001 -- this film uses performance capture to give digital apes human-like expressions.  The effect is not entirely convincing (as I mentioned) but the concept is promising.  Using digital capture, actors can 'give life to' any number of possibilities, including I suppose dead actors' likenesses (Star Wars 17).

One thing about this film that I kinda DID like, revealed in the extras: this film sets up the original Charlton Heston film as a sort of prequel.  There are lots of hooks for PotA fanatics (of which I'm not one, or I'd have noticed) which pay off in the first film of the original series.  So, even though the film is not part of the PotA canon, and is done in a completely different way -- and frankly looks nothing like the others -- it's intended to form a chain with them.

It's a nice thought, anyway.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Why make a movie if the audience can guess the whole plot after ten minutes?

You've just described ninety-five percent of movies.

Ted Sturgeon agrees.

Any "reboot" is going to suffer from the faults you have identified, if all it does is return to the same source material. The Star Trek reboot dodged a few bullets by employing time-travel tricks. It went back to a point before the original series started, and created a new branch of history, thus achieving the effect of a reboot without having to pretend the old shows/movies didn't exist, and at the same time giving itself almost complete freedom to use new actors and new plots going forward - very clever! But although PotA used time travel in both the original book and the movies, this reboot sticks with the same timeline, and just seeks to retell the same stories with better movie technology. Hence your criticisms.

I enjoyed watching that first movie, anyway. I found the special effects very impressive, and I wasn't expecting anything very new in the plot. But I didn't like it enough to watch the next movies in the series.