Directed By: Rupert Wyatt / Matt Reeves Starring: Andy Serkis, James Franco, Toby Kebbell, Jason Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Gary Oldman, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Karin Konoval, Nick Thurston, Judy Greer, Brian Cox, Keri Russell, Terry Notary, Amiah Miller, Tom Felton, Steve Zahn, Sara Canning, Michael Adamthwaite
Certificate: 12 Running Time: Approx 375 minutes
Like many around my age, I suspect, I grew up with Planet of the Apes movies on TV now and then, particularly the first one starting Charlton Heston. I don't think I realised it at the time but there were actually five films in that series, and following those there were two TV series', neither of which lasted long, and of course Tim Burton's remake in 2001 which I never got around to watching for some reason. THEN!! News arose of a reboot. Is that what the movie-going public wanted? If you're going to reboot a franchise like this though, why not really reboot it? What's the most popular way of doing that these days? Yes that's right, an origin story! This is actually an ultra-skillish premise. I'm not an expert on the franchise but I'm not sure the original series of films ever explained how our poor planet came to be overrun by talking chest-beaters, did it? So, let's find out.
In what I suppose is a minor spoiler, it turns out that it's all our own fault, shockingly! But we're getting ahead of ourselves, for the first film in this reboot trilogy is set in what seems to be the present day and all seems reasonably well (or at least normal, for our standards). So how did we manage to screw things up so badly? It all starts with one man and his insistence on meddling with the natural order of things.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes(2011)
The man is pharmaceutical chemist William Rodman (Franco) who has been working feverishly on a cure for Alzheimer's disease, motivated at least in part by his deteriorating father (Lithgow). The test subjects are chimps and when his most promising patient is killed, leaving behind a baby, Will takes the flea-picking cretin home to raise him, naming him Caesar. It doesn't take long for Caesar to demonstrate the same increased intelligence his mother did and he lives as a member of Will's family rather than a pet or test subject. Years later, however, a young adult Caesar (Serkis) is involved in a confrontation with an aggressive neighbour and is taken and dumped in an ape shelter. How things move from here a step closer to a world resembling that of the original films would be revealing too much, but we get a fascinating as well as plausible scenario for how it happens. It's a film without a single, definable main bad guy too. Will is impatient, perhaps reckless, but he's trying to do good. Franco makes him a likeable guy too, and he along with all the other humans do a great job. It's a superb Serkis as Caesar who earned the most plaudits though, and deservedly so. A towering and sympathetic performance in a fantastic film... 9/10
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes(2014)
It's now several years later and the virus that was born and released in the last film has decimated earth's population, causing total societal collapse. Pockets of people - those immune to the virus - remain. One such group lives in San Francisco close to the woods in which Caesar and the other apes now live, and inevitably they come into contact. The apes don't trust the humans who are just trying to rig a dam for power, and Caesar as ape leader, under pressure from some resentful apes, issues the humans with an ultimatum - keep away or there will be war. No humans from the first film are here - presumably they're dead - but leading the new human cast is Clarke as Malcolm who just wants peace with the apes but the leader of the human settlement, Dreyfus (Oldman), is less trusting. A few apes return from the previous film though. Aside from the Caesar who is more captivating than ever thanks to Serkis, we have the bitter bonobo Koba (Kebbell), loyal Rocket (Notary), and the wonderful orangutan Maurice (Konoval), as well as Caesar's wife Cornelia (Greer) and son Blue Eyes (Thurston). It's quite a cast of simians and all of them are realised amazingly well thanks to superb acting, CGI and dialogue. A fantastic, tense sequel... 9/10
War for the Planet of the Apes(2017)
An unspecified period later, Caesar and his group of grunters are now at war with humans, specifically a ruthless colonel (Harrelson) and his army which includes some apes opposed to Caesar's leadership. Those loyal to him decide to head for a desert oasis that Rocket and Blue Eyes found and set up home there. Caesar, Rocket, Maurice and a gorilla called Luca (Adamthwaite) head in a different direction as a decoy. Meanwhile, the simian flu has now mutated and renders humans mute rather than kills them. Caesar & Co encounter one such sufferer - a young girl they call Nova (Miller) - as well as a strange new ape calling himself Bad Ape (Zahn). They'll need all the help they can get to withstand the might of actual human soldiers as well as the ape traitors too. The going has never been tougher for poor Caesar, and Serkis has probably never been better either. Caesar and the other apes have been brought to life wonderfully here, including some memorable new ones, and it's impossible not to root for them over our own kind. Harrelson steals the show for the humans, of course, with his gung-ho, trigger-happy colonel, but this is a film - and indeed trilogy - that belongs to our supposedly less-advanced cousins. A brilliant end to a brilliant trilogy which must surely be remembered as one of the best ever... 9/10
Final Thoughts:
I'm sure many older film fans were alarmed at news of a Planet of the Apes reboot, and I imagine a far greater number didn't really give a crap either way, regardless of the talent that was attached to the project - it's not like reboots or remakes are particularly popular. Who could've imagined the awesomeness of what we'd end up with? I don't think there was any one person who was responsible, it was more just one of those magical occasions where everything fitted and everything worked.
Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves both did outstanding jobs but they were fortunate enough to be working with superb screenplays and were surrounded by great talent too. The human actors involved were all great, but not so great as to overshadow the ape characters which were the real triumph of the trilogy. Their CGI is flawless, and let's not forget we live in an age where CGI can still be pretty ropey on occasion (*coughBlackPanthercough*), but it was still up to human performers to make them walk and talk and... well, make them human, at least in terms of how convincingly they held your attention and pulled at your emotions, and they all did that amazingly well; perhaps better than any previous non-human characters.
They certainly aren't mere animals, that's for sure, and if one person should (and did) get more credit than anyone else for that, it's Andy Serkis who has surely become the best CGI actor of all time. Gollum had some people's jaws on the floor but Caesar surpasses him. And this is coming from someone who counts LOTR as their favourite film(s) of all-time! His work here is pivotal to the success of the films and sets new standards for motion-capture, voice and CGI acting.
What we're left with is in my opinion the best movie trilogy since LOTR, ironically. Not better than Peter Jackson's stunning trilogy but possibly better than any other; certainly any other since. Many trilogies have one or two great instalments but few are consistently brilliant throughout. This one is.
Special Note: In news that, unlike that of this trilogy, makes me and probably many others happy, there is a new trilogy on the way too, starting with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, due in 2024 - hooray! In the meantime, in case you haven't seen this trilogy yet, heres a trailer for just the first part:
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