REVIEW: Rise of the Planet of the Apes Can't Sink Much Lower
I could describe Rise of the Planet of the Apes as Escape from Alcatraz, except with apes, but that would make it sound like a movie you might actually want to see. I could also describe it as an "origin story" that supposedly explains, albeit in a rather indirect fashion, how apes became evolved enough to wear black leather-trimmed tunics and walk around speaking in cultured voices that sound suspiciously like those of Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall. But even if that's the movie director Rupert Wyatt thinks he's making -- and the one James Franco thinks he's starring in -- that's not the movie I saw.
The backstory told in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is infinitely less compelling -- and less inspired -- than the one told in Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 Planet of the Apes, in which astronaut Charlton Heston crash-lands on a planet where apes are king and humans are second-class citizens. According to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the whole thing began with a dream: San Francisco scientist Will Rodman (Franco) hopes the cure for Alzheimer's lies in a serum he's been injecting into apes. His crusade is personal: His father, Charles (John Lithgow), is suffering from the disease. (Its chief effect, apparently, is to make him play the piano very, very badly.) When Will's most important guinea-ape is shot and killed after having a major temper tantrum, it's discovered that she was pregnant when captured; apparently, unbeknownst to everyone in the lab, she gave birth in her cage and hid her baby behind a ledge in there. Or something.
Will takes the baby chimp home, and Charles, in a brief moment of non-piano-playing lucidity, christens him Caesar. It soon becomes clear that Caesar possesses above-average intelligence; the serum injected into his mom had made her supersmart too, and because it also changed her genetic makeup, she was able to pass this gift along to her offspring. Will raises Caesar as if he were a son, helped along by his girlfriend, pretty zoo doctor Caroline (Freida Pinto). He even teaches the chimp sign language. But because Will is so busy being a scientist and chimp-dad, he doesn't have time to go see Project Nim, and so he doesn't realize that somehow or other, his experiment is doomed to fail. After Caesar bites the finger off a mean neighbor, he's incarcerated in a supposedly clean, pleasant and humane ape facility run by Brian Cox. Run, don't walk, little chimp!
Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- which was written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (who adapted their ideas, as the writers of the earlier franchise did, from Pierre Boulle's novel La Planète des Singes) -- is too earnest and dour to be a silly bit of summer fun, but it's not exactly scientifically sound, either. I kept waiting for a brainy chimp to be catapulted into space. For one brief, hopeful moment, I wondered if John Lithgow, upon being injected with his son's miracle serum, might turn into a chimp.
That would have been something, but no go. By the time Caesar and his fellow imprisoned apes stage their jailbreak -- the beginning of a rampage that eventually takes them to the Golden Gate Bridge, ostensibly because a.) for there are cables for them to climb on and swing from but more likely because b.) it's there -- the movie's grayed-out look and heavy-duty computer-generated enhancements begin to lose their charms, which are puny to begin with.
Caesar is played, with the help of a motion-capture leotard and lots of computer flimflam, by Andy Serkis, and though Serkis has played an ape before -- he provided the eyes and soul of Peter Jackson's King Kong -- he's unconvincing here. It's hard to say if the chief problem is the technology or the performance; it's probably a combination of both. A computer-generated ape is so much less human-seeming than a real one. Caesar's eyes, in particular, look all wrong -- they're piercing rather than winsome, and they look hostile even when he's supposedly doing something sweet, like clambering into daddy Will's arms for a cuddle. We need to sympathize with Caesar for the movie to work, but from infancy, he just looks shifty and untrustworthy.
I'm not so sure about Franco, either. He's a gifted actor, but he seems to be sleepwalking, or at least just shuffling listlessly, through Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It's possible he doesn't care about the movie at all: Could it be one of his winking little experiments, a gag along the lines of pretending to host the Oscars while not really doing anything? Franco has become so meta- that it's almost impossible to take anything he does, or any character he plays, at face value. It doesn't help that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the kind of picture in which one character, about to witness some dastardly procedure visited upon some poor unsuspecting laboratory animal, announces, "I didn't authorize that!" only to have another stride in just in time to say, "No -- I did!" Who's really in charge here? It's impossible to know. But these apes will have to evolve a lot further before they do any more rising.
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Comments
Having SEEN the film at a (lucky me!) preview I disagree completely with this review. But that's ok. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. It's a shame just about everyone has a forum to be read thanks to the internet. What I take most offense at is the snarky hipster way in which it is written. I suppose to transmit your snide dismissive tone properly through the written word you have to drip with extra bile. On top of that you expose a good deal of the plot. How very reviewer 101 no-no of you. I suspect that when you see free movies ALL the time, and have to pick them apart to make a living it is difficult to enjoy a fun, intelligent and good looking film (I hate CGI 97% of the time, but this worked quite well). I try to ask friends whose tastes I share about potential films and yes, we might agree. The nice thing about those interchanges is that no one has to feel superior in the way they deliver their thoughts.
Of course they have to evolve some more! Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was the Planet of the Apes. The movie sets everything in motion for the apes to grow stronger and for the humans to grow weaker. You can't expect the entire population of apes to evolve to the point of domination in the space of an hour and a half. I felt the movie really set things up.
This Review is an absolute Joke. Yes Yes Movies are subjective and everyone is entitled to their own opinion but when you actually compare this review to the reaction and high praise its received from every other film or movie site on the internet the reviewer just comes across as being quiet clueless.
You gave it 4.4 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes has it as %86 fresh,,,
You actually rated The green lantern higher giving it 6.5
How do you have a job Reviewing Movies
Why are Stephanie Zacharek's movie reviews so overwhelmingly negative and often contrary to the concensus?
She's actually given The Dark Knight a negative review and yet is the only critic in
the known world to give The last Airbender praise,,
Don't take anything she says seriously!!!
We get it, Jamie. Two comments is enough without having to link out to another anti-SZ rant. That link has been removed.
OMG WHY DONT YOU CONFORM MOFUGGA?!!!
You must not have read Scott Bowles, Colin Covert, or the 8 other critics who gave Airbender a positive review (and keep in mind that 42% of RT users like Airbender). You also must have missed the other 20 critics who gave The Dark Knight short strift, quite a handful of whom are top critics. You also seem to have missed every single one of Stephanie Zachareck's positive reviews for popular movies such as Crazy, Stupid Love, and Horrible Bosses, and the Harry Potter series, and Thor. Popular movies, positive reviews, agrees with consensus. Maybe you should do your research.
...and overwhelmingly negative? She did give this 4 out of ten. That's almost average. Hardly overwhelming the way most critics hissed at Airbender with zeros.
"Yes Yes Movies are subjective and everyone is entitled to their own opinion but when you actually compare this review to the reaction and high praise its received from every other film or movie site on the internet the reviewer just comes across as being quiet clueless."
The fact that you can contradict yourself in the same sentence without realizing it makes me wonder what grade you're in. You pay lip service to the idea that movies are subjective, and then you say they're not. The concept of "everyone's entitled to their own opinion" is quite clearly lost on you, as you insist that because Stephanie Zachareck's opinion doesn't follow consensus, her opinion must be wrong. That you can think opinions are right and wrong betrays your ignorance of the concept of subjectivity, in which no opinions are right or wrong. It also doesn't help that you insist on using only final scores rather than actual content to indicate whether her opinion is of merit or not, indicating that you don't actually read the reviews, many of which pick out the same problems other reviewers do. And there are, in fact, 21 other critics (quite a few of whom are featured as top critics on Metacritic) who also panned this movie. Are THEY clueless, too? Is everybody who finds themselves in the minority wrong? Or is taste truly subjective? If you believe that taste is subjective, you wouldn't be trying to discredit Zachareck using mass consensus.
And the fact that you even use mass consensus as a test to see whether movies are good or not indicates that your taste in movies is dictated to you, and that you don't actually think for yourself or figure out your own taste, which would make sense, since you don't read reviews or understand subjectivity, or make sure any of your claims against Zachareck can be supported with facts. Here's a fact: Zachareck has written 170 reviews, and out of those, 121 of them have been positive. So she can't possibly be "always so overwhelmingly negative and often contrary". They're only contrary if you're ignorant.
I don't even think I've covered all the ways in which you have failed on this board, but I'm sure someone will come and pick up the slack.
...like Thor, Horrible Bosses, Harry Potter and Crazy, Stupid, Love?
^^^ What he said.
It's because sheep like to hang with their flock. I recall the same sort of anger and hostility when Stephanie dared to post a less-than-enthusiastic review of "Inception". Same hysteria, same hostility and probably even the same commenters.
Why inject the brain cell replicating serum into a chimp any way, why not use humans? People with Alzheimer's or any serious mind degenerative disease have a very short life expectency any way. 1 would think in a case where your mind has gone to mush no 1 is going to care if you use a human as a Guinea pig, hell they do that every day even if the drug is FDA approved, does not anyone listen when they list the possible side effects of the average presciption drug?
Just saw the movie......... GREAT! As for the reviewer of this movie, Stephanie whatever........ ever wonder why you're writing an online review??? Probably bad judgement, which most of have from time to time... Watch the movie again, and re-write the review Steph!
Scientifically sound? You realize it's science FICTION right?
Seriously?! You guys gave The Smurfs a 7, and now you're giving Rise of the Planet of the Apes a 4.5?! Do you guys do big lines of cocaine before you type up a review?!
I like Stephanie Zacharek's reviews, and her world view is always interesting. I'm still going to see Rise of The Planet of The Apes, because I enjoy the privilege of being able to form my own opinions, being an autonomous adult
You are a complete moron. You are one of those people who look for the bad in everything because you want to get a response. This is exactly why I hate critics, they think somehow their opinion has any value whatsoever. Why don't you go huck some frys at McDonalds because that about the most talent you have.
Hate to jump on the irrational, spittle-flecked bandwagon--especially as someone who didn't much care for, say, THE DARK KNIGHT--but having seen the APES movie last night, I can't help but wonder if Zacharek isn't being a tad...dense...here. The film has a slightly wobbly logic, and the motivations are sometimes stretched, but its skewed world does make sense on its own terms. And the amount of time spent just with the apes--their communicating, politicking, stages of development--was uniquely thrilling to watch, and bold for a big summer season movie. The CGI is next level...it's scary how good it is.
Alas, she is right on about Franco. He plays the whole movie like he's nursing a hangover. Or, rather, a "hangover."
It was brave of you, John. Not only did you willingly enter a bandwagon filled with the irrational and spittle-flecked, but one headed by someone you couldn't convince yourself wasn't a dense driver! With the film already being slightly wobbly, stretched, and skewed, how did you so quickly brace yourself for this quite possibly hellish ride!?
I didn't know it was a critic's job to express only consensus opinions. I thought--mistakenly, if I am to believe your post (along with many others here)--that a critic, at least a good, independent, courageous one, should strive to record his or her honest responses to the work. That's what Zacharek does, and, I think, does compellingly. If a critic's views are at odds with the consensus views, why does that automatically mean, to some people, that she is being an attention-seeking contrarian? Another possibility: Maybe, just maybe, she genuinely dislikes the picture.
Pauline Kael, too, was often accused of being perversely contrarian in her reviews. For example, she loathed popular pictures like "ET," "Jaws," "The Godfather," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," "Tootsie"...wait. What? Oh, yeah, she *loved* them.
If you know this reviewer, you should know that she likes to diss on movies which are gaining favorable opinion elsewhere...
Her reviews are subject to the laws of opposite momentum..
I have to say I agree with this review, and then some, and I'm extremely annoyed whenever I see trolls flock over to bombard a page the second they see a negative review on Rotten Tomatoes. Do people not get that two people can have different opinions and still be right? Is that too far out there of a concept for people to grasp?
Franco is a drug addict. He thinks it's clever to go to work 'baked'. He's in danger of ruining his career.
I liked your review Stephanie. Although, I expect you don't read these comments anyway :O(
Behold, the internet's first perfect comment! Nice one Trace ;O)
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