Somewhere in the world, James Franco is thinking about cutting his own arm off over Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
By Casey Jarman
Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens with a family of CGI chimpanzees, in single file, nobly navigating a lush forest—the kind of sprawling, fairy-tale forest that doesn’t really exist these days—when they’re suddenly attacked from all sides by sneering poachers who snatch them up in nets, cage them and ship them off to a research facility in San Francisco.
In quick cuts of bright green, earthy brown and pure white, flashing teeth, the scene makes a false promise: These motherfucking apes are going to get their revenge and it’s going to be awesome.
OK, so the apes—or the Children of the Apes, anyway—do get a bit of revenge. But 105 minutes later, very little awesomeness has come to pass: just a lot of stiff, hammy lines from central beefcake James Franco and $90 million worth of underwhelming action scenes you’ve already seen.
Instead of a bold new world, we get the sunny suburbs of a postcard-perfect San Francisco, with a slack-jawed and entirely miscast Franco—playing a self-absorbed super scientist named Will Rodman—as our guide. The movie spoon-feeds us heap after generous heap of banal, pseudoscientific backstory before leading us to a semiclimactic ape revolt on the Golden Gate Bridge. The movie’s events take place over the span of eight years—though neither Franco nor his girlfriend (the quite pretty and seldom speaking Freida Pinto) seems to do any aging—with most of the apes transforming from uncivilized beasts to a sophisticated Tom Clancy-style tactical assault force literally overnight.
Rise leaves its audience absolutely nothing to think about except a sequel. It would take a stoned philosophy major to squeeze any meaning out of this thing, and that’s a shame, because on paper, a mainstream film that asks its audience to root for escaped research animals is pretty transgressive.
But save for Franco’s one-line apology to lead ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) at the end of the film, the ethics of animal testing go rather untested, and there’s certainly no room for metaphor or thoughtful symbolism or big questions in a movie packed with one-dimensional good versus evil types. I’ve seen episodes of Lassie that made me ponder the human-animal relationship more than Rise did, and in fact, this whole shit show reminded me more of Homeward Bound than it did of the 1968 Apes film that started it all.
The only conceivable purpose Rise serves is to lay the groundwork for a franchise that, despite a near-unwatchable first episode, has nowhere to go but up. And maybe that’s all we want from an Apes reboot: a really expensive, two-hour version of a television pilot. It doesn’t matter that no one in this movie can act, because humans are replaceable and CGI apes are immortal. It doesn’t matter that the movie says nothing, because all it needs to say is “stay tuned.” This is a nothing film—an extended trailer for the next film two summers from now.
Casey Jarman is the music editor at Willamette Week in Portland, Ore.
Rise of Planet of the Apes
Directed by Rupert WyattWith James Franco, Freida Pinto, Andy Serkis, John Lithgow, Tom Felton and Brian Cox
Dreamcatcher, Regal Stadium 14,
PG-13105 min.
