Film Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Rated M (violence). 105 minutes. Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Screenplay by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle.

Depending on how you prefer to organise your filing system, someone in Hollywood has opened the ‘R’, the ‘P’ or the ‘A’ drawer in the great, big filing cabinet that is marked ‘Great Films We Could Make Again’. In the case of this ‘reboot’ of the legendary Planet of the Apes series – five films beginning with Planet of the Apes (1968) and ending with Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) – it’s nothing more than origins of the species nostalgia with lashings of 21st century techno-dazzle.

Tim Burton’s much-maligned 2001 angry, intense and visually impressive remake of the original (starring Mark Wahlberg) has been curiously side-stepped here as we launch back into the series with a film that shouldn’t work. It eventually does – but it’s a long, mostly unsatisfactory wait. And it’s only Andy Serkis engaging performance as Caesar that ensures our interest is maintained.

Mr Serkis is Hollywood’s go-to guy for motion (or performance) capture – a state-of-the-art technological process whereby the intricacies of a human actor’s physical performance are mapped by computer software and translated onto the screen in digitally-enhanced imagery. The process was used to bring Mr Serkis’s ‘Gollum’ and ‘Kong’ to life in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings and King Kong respectively – and it’s only Mr Jackson’s Weta Digital apes that hold this peculiarly old-fashioned flick together.

James Franco (127 Hours) is occasionally engaging as Will Rodman, a genetic scientist who is developing a cure for Alzheimer's by testing his genetically engineered retrovirus on primates. When it all goes horribly wrong (as these kinds of things inevitably do), a deadly virus is released into the world that delivers extraordinary levels of intelligence and strength to the ape population – while threatening to wipe out (in a mid-credits sequence) the human race. And unlike the famously confronting final scene of the 1968 original (pictured), this time it’s impossible to know why we should care.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.