Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Tedious

OK, so like everyone else this weekend, I shelled out ten bucks to go see that monkey movie. And sadly, this movie draaaaaags. We get a nice concise intro where a bunch of chimps are caught in a jungle and end up in a genetics lab. Then there is all this time spent orienting us to the character Bright Eyes (Terry Notary). This would be fine except for the fact that she isn’t central to the story. It is her son Caesar (Andy Serkis) who is the true protagonist of the film. The first thirty minutes spent a lot of time setting up that sometimes animals from experiment labs can be dangerous, and sometimes scientists who have a conflict of interests can be torn between emotion and ethics. I would wager that these two concepts are quite enormously “duh” inspiring to most audiences, and I believe that is why the film seems to creep along at such a tedious pace.

So after Bright Eyes goes on a rampage, the project’s funding is cut and all of the chimps that were experimented on are to be terminated. Chimp Handler Robert Franklin (Tyler Labine) can’t bring himself to kill the last chimp, Caesar, who Bright Eyes had birthed unbeknownst to the lab staff. Scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) takes Caesar home and raises him as his own in a sort of weird pet/son hybrid sort of way. This whole sequence, and the sequences that follow seem maddeningly slow because we all know that super-smart Caesar will become dissatisfied with being treated like a pet/freak, and we keep waiting for all of the other shoes to drop, but we have to sit through it all as blissfully unaware Rodman tries to imbue a sense of normalcy into an inherently un-normal situation. During all of this, Rodman got his funding back because he “cured” his live-in, Alzheimer’s ridden father (John Lithgow) and the lab started a whole new series of trials on a whole bunch of monkeys. But his dad eventually starts to weaken and finally things come to a head when Caesar rightfully lashes out against a man who was antagonizing Rodman’s dad and animal control is called. Caesar is relegated to a horrible animal shelter and is not allowed to go home because he attacked someone. 

Finally, we are where we should have started from. Caesar hates being caged and treated like an animal, but he learns that he belongs with the monkeys and starts planning how to enhance their intelligence and escape. Of course, Rodman is an ineffectual dope who just wants everyone to love each other… apparently the fool never read Frankenstein (it should be required reading for all geneticists in my book). Anyway, Caesar rallies his kind and, as is to be expected, all the people freak out. There are some cool action sequences, and then it’s over. 

So yeah, we get a slow drag because we see all the plot points coming from miles away and the writers started the story way to early, which sort of cheats us out of interesting things we could’ve seen between Caesar and Rodman or Caesar and the other monkeys. 

This is the longest hour and forty minute movie I’ve seen in a long while. If you enjoy monkeys and Disney-like plots that jerk those tears out of you with images of lost family and animal cruelty, I think you will enjoy this picture. Just don’t expect a good plot, or even believability—shortcuts were made by creating several evil monkey-hating people instead of actually doing the foot-work for some of the characters. The same goes for the “good-guys,” who seem so ignorant and cream-puffy that it just kinda makes you feel bleh about them. 

Don’t get me wrong though, the freaking monkeys are AMAZING! Andy Serkis is awesome as always, and I suppose I’ll up my grade just because the monkeys were so good… and really, that’s all this movie was advertising anyways—cool monkeys, so good on them for at least nailing the marketing pitch on the head.