Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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It’s like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in reverse.

Never bet against the primates! Rise of the Planet of the Apes creates a new jumping-off point for audiences in the world of the Planet of the Apes. It tells the heartbreaking story of a man and his ape, which takes a horrible turn, putting humanity on the track to extinction as apes become the dominant species.

First Impressions

A scientist at a large company creates a cure for a disease. He tests it on a baby chimpanzee, Caesar, to ensure its efficacy and safety. It works, and also makes the ape smart, so smart that it lives at home with him like a child. The director of the firm wants the ape returned and puts it in cages in the facility with other apes. This upsets Caesar, who escapes and uses the gaseous agent on other apes. Humans of San Francisco are suddenly surrounded by intelligent apes using crude weaponry as they fight for their freedom. This week, witness the Rise of The Planet of the Apes.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In Africa, poachers hunt and capture chimpanzees, which are sent to Gen-Sys in San Francisco, California. One ape, named Bright Eyes (moCap by Terry Notary) becomes super smart after being injected with an experimental drug called ALZ-112. Will Rodman (James Franco) is the lead scientist working on gene therapy to repair brain cells and reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo), the director of Gen-Sys, brings Bright Eyes into a board meeting for funding approval. Unfortunately, the ape goes crazy and is put down by security guards. Will and his assistant, Robert Franklin (Tyler Labine), discover that Bright Eyes was only being protective of a baby that she had birthed while in captivity.

Not knowing what else to do, Will takes the baby chimp home to care for it along with his father, Charles (John Lithgow), who is suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s. Three years later, the chimp, Caesar (moCap by Andy Serkis), is super intelligent and has become part of the family. Charles has gotten worse, so Will decides to steal some of the ALZ-112 from the lab and administer it to him. The next day, most of Charles’ symptoms are gone. Caesar gets out of the house, being curious about the bicycle of the kid next door. He is scared by the mean neighbor,  Hunsicker (David Hewlett), and gets injured. Will takes Caesar to a local animal vet, Caroline (Freida Pinto), to get patched up, and then the three of them visit Muir Woods, where Will lets Caesar run free in the trees.

Five years later, Will and Caroline are dating and still taking Caesar to the woods. The ape, who speaks with American Sign Language, becomes concerned when he sees a dog on a leash like his. He asks Will if he’s a pet, and exerts his free will by sitting in the back seat of the pickup instead of the rear. Will takes Caesar by Gen-Sys and tells him this is where he was born. Charles’ symptoms have been getting worse due to his immune system killing off the virus from ALZ-112. He becomes confused and tries to drive away in Hunsicker’s car. Caesar believes Hunsicker is hurting Charles and attacks the neighbor, biting his finger. Caesar is taken by animal control to the local shelter for primates, where he is mistreated by Dodge Landon (Tom Felton), the son of the owner, John Landon (Brian Cox).

At Gen-Sys, Will begins work on ALZ-113, an aerosolized spray, using a new chimp named Koba (moCap by Chris Gordon). Robert is accidentally dosed with the drug when Koba pulls his respirator off. Caesar is not only abused by Dodge, but also by the alpha male, Rocket (moCap by Terry Notary). Using his hyper intelligence, Caesar escapes from his cage and opens the cage for a gorilla, Buck (moCap by Richard Ridings), whom he befriends. Caesar uses Buck to subjugate Rocket, taking control of all the primates, including an old circus orangutan, Maurice (moCap by Karin Konoval). Charles refuses the new medication from Will and dies. Robert, who is now ill and sneezing blood, comes to visit Will and accidentally infects Hunsicker.

Caesar escapes the sanctuary and returns to Will’s house, realizing how different he is from the humans. He steals the vials of ALZ-113 and doses all the primates at the shelter. When Dodge attempts to corral the disobedient apes with a stun stick the next morning, Caesar turns a firehose on him, electrocuting him. The other apes tear Dodge apart before they all escape into the city. Caesar leads the apes to free other pockets of animals at the zoo and in Gen-Sys. The band of apes follows Caesar across the Golden Gate Bridge where they terrorize commuters. The local police block off the bridge and attempt to subdue the primates, but are quickly attacked and outnumbered.

Steven, who is on a helicopter, directs a sniper to kill Caesar, their leader. Buck attacks the copter, taking the bullet meant for Caesar. In the wreck of the copter, Caesar mourns Buck and then turns his back on Steven, who pleads for help. Koba shoves the copter over the edge, where it crashes into the water. Will tries to reason with Caesar to bring him home. Caesar surprises Will with the ability to speak. He says “No,” that he is home with his kind and in the woods. Will, stunned, lets him be. In a mid-credit scene, Hunsiker, a pilot, is walking through the airport to his flight when his nose begins to bleed. A graphic shows the global spread of a virus that will kill off most of humanity.

“I know it’s been hard for you, but you’re trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” – Caroline

History in the Making

After a decade without any films in the Planet of the Apes franchise, Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrived with the promise of a whole new series of stories. Rise is the seventh film in a franchise that dates back 43 years to the original Planet of the Apes starring Charlton Heston. That 1958 movie spawned four sequels between 1970 and 1973, which collectively told a circular story about the survivors from the first film discovering what was Beneath the Planet of the Apes. That was followed by the time-travel paradoxical story of the Escape from the Planet of the Apes. That third film set up the origins of the original film in near-present-day America, so that the last two films could show the Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and finally the Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which logically connects back to the original Planet of the Apes. The films also led to two television series, Planet of the Apes (1974) and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975-76), along with several comic book adaptations of further adventures from Gold Key and Marvel Comics. Just think, all of this from one 1963 novel by French author Pierre Boulle.

In 2001 (of all years), Tim Burton released his reinterpretation/reimagining of the story in the unoriginally titled Planet of the Apes. Seeking to tell a similar story to modern audiences necessitated a twist ending, but one that the audience wouldn’t see coming. No danger here! The film was enjoyable, but did not reinvigorate the franchise as 20th Century Fox had expected. By the mid-2000s, screenwriter Rick Jaffa was inspired to create a new screenplay, with his wife and writing partner Amanda Silver, that explored the origins of a world where apes ruled over feral humans. Their original idea was not part of this franchise, but when they realized that it could connect, telling the origins of the intelligent apes, they pitched the idea to Fox as a new entry point in the franchise, much like the superhero tale Batman Begins. British director Rupert Wyatt was tapped to helm the film, his first big-budget feature and mainstream hit. He had directed one feature film previously in 2008, The Escapist, about a prison break. When asked about the direction of the film, he replied that he saw more films coming from the world of the Planet of the Apes, if this one was successful, of course; however, this was the end of his involvement in the franchise.

Genre-fication

The original Planet of the Apes captured audiences’ imaginations immediately. A strange world where talking apes rode horses, carried guns, and ruled over mute humans. It set the tone for all future films in the franchise, but also revealed that the strange world that the apes ruled was actually the Earth of the future. How had this catastrophic change come about? The original sequels had an idea about that. Following the events of the first sequel (Beneath), where the world was destroyed in an atomic holocaust, Cornelius and Zira escaped in a rocketship, traveling backwards in time to 1973 Earth. There (in Escape From), Zira gives birth to a baby chimpanzee (named Milo at the time) before both she, Cornelius, and the baby are killed by the humans. Little did the military realize that a befriended circus owner, Armando (Ricardo Montalban), had switched the baby with one of his circus chimps, and he takes Milo to raise as his own. After a 1983 space-born plague wipes out cats and dogs, apes were adopted as pets and turned into slave labor, as the American society devolved into police states. Now, in 1991 (Conquest of), Milo, using the name Caesar, quietly leads an ape rebellion. The finale of the series (Battle for) creates the final creation of the ape theocracy as Caesar becomes the first leader of the planet of the apes.

It’s interesting to see the connective tissue pulled from the original films and repurposed into Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The first ape to have super-intelligence is named Caesar, and he begins the ape rebellion by freeing his fellow imprisoned chimps, orangutans, and gorillas and dosing them with the human-created serum. Caesar being raised by a human is another commonality. This direct connection to Will as a father figure is what allows some humanity to seep into Caesar’s consciousness and leads to further plot points as the series continues. The first word spoken by Caesar in this film is “no.” This was the same word spoken by the chimp Lisa in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and an important first word for both characters as they insist that they will no longer play by the humans’ rules. The pandemic that kills off house pets doesn’t appear in the new film. Instead, Will’s experiments lead to a pandemic that appears to kill the majority of the humans, if the graphic at the end is to be believed. Future films will continue this thread. Most casual filmgoers may not have recognized these elements from the lackluster sequels, but they most certainly noticed several homages to the original Planet of The Apes. Dodge makes direct quotes of two famous lines spoken by Charlton Heston in the original film, “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” and “Take your stinking paw off me, you damn dirty ape,” which leads to Caesar’s first-spoken line, “no.” Dodge’s mistreatment of Caesar and the other primates mirrors the apes’ treatment of Colonel Taylor in the original film, specifically the use of a firehose. Since Rise of The Planet of the Apes is an origin story, the level of ape versus human action is limited, but in order to make up for that, most of the third act consists of the apes’ escape and battle at the Golden Gate Bridge. Does anything nice ever happen at that bridge in movies?

Societal Commentary

Rise of the Planet of the Apes presents a refrain to “the man wasn’t meant to meddle” medley. Yet this version of the age-old sci-fi trope of scientists poking and prodding things is not as egregious as in other films like The Invisible Man or Jurassic Park. The work that Will and the team at Gen-Sys are working on is not just to see if they can do something; it is to serve a very real and important issue in society. Well, that may not be true for everyone, since Steven is perfectly okay to shortcut clinical trials in hopes of a big payday for himself and the board. But for Will, the search for a cure to Alzheimer’s disease is an intensely personal one. His father suffers greatly from the disease, and Will is his primary caregiver. He wants to give his father back his life, which includes the beauty of playing the piano, and is so focused on the goal that he ignores other protocols. The drug that Will invents is amazing, and has much potential in the world. But his lack of protocol and security around its manufacture and storage leads to the worst possible outcome in the world he lives in. Spoiler alert: Will doesn’t show up in any of the sequels and is presumed to be one of the billions of people killed off by the plague caused by ALZ-113.

Scientific carelessness is only one of the problems shown in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The other theme, reflected by the quote above, is about trying to domesticate wild animals. Stories have emerged over the decades of wild animals being raised in captivity or by individuals, only to have these creatures turn on their humans. Whether it’s a killer whale that turns on its trainer or a pet tiger that attacks its owner, humans seem to forget wild animals are just that–wild. Primates, especially chimpanzees, exhibit so many traits of humans that it can be easy to think of them as harmless. Caroline is the only one in the film who understands the truth. She says, “I love chimpanzees. I’m also afraid of them,” which shows the reality of these creatures. Even though this animal is small, it is one and a half times as strong as a person. Meaning that when the chimpanzee reverts to territorial behavior, it could easily injure or kill someone around it. This domestication of wild animals leads to one of the most heartbreaking scenes when Caesar is being led out of the woods by Will on a leash. Caesar sees a dog, also on a leash, and asks his human if he is a pet. Will tells him that he is not, and offers his birth story. But it is obvious in both word and deed that Caesar is not actually part of the family, and doesn’t hold the same standing as a human.

The Science in The Fiction

The science of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is about humans attempting to alter their world for the better by attacking the cause of Alzheimer’s disease within the brain. The film creates the premise that ALZ-112, and its successor 113, are a gene therapy allowing the brain to create new cells. This replaces the ones that are damaged by the neurodegenerative disease, causing recipients to regain their abilities, as shown with Charlie, who is able to play the piano again one day after getting his first dose. A truly remarkable invention. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as the ability to regenerate brain cells as of yet. Also, Alzheimer’s doesn’t necessarily destroy brain cells. From what is known, a buildup of amyloid beta occurs in patients with the disease. This buildup interferes with neurons and the normal functioning of the brain. It’s as if the brain becomes clogged with these amino acids, which block the pathways used by the brain to remember things. New studies have been announced in just the past few days about using blood tests to help predict how quickly dementia may occur. This helps doctors personalize lifestyle changes to ease the effects that amyloid buildup may have on any particular patient. No easy shortcut in our reality. But then, also no risk for talking monkeys either.

The Final Frontier

Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a successful shot at revitalizing the Apes franchise. It spawned a series of comic book prequels and sequels from IDW Comics, which included stories not only from the new series of films but also new tales from the original franchise as well. One of the most interesting is Planet of the Apes: Visionaries, which adapts the original Rod Serling script for Planet of the Apes. The film series continues with, as of this writing, three more sequels. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which was released in 2014. Three years later, War for the Planet of the Apes came out. And then just last year, in 2024, the third sequel, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, debuted. For fans like me, I’d be happy to not get prequels and just jump into the action of a Planet of the Apes film, like the most recent tale. But Hollywood is a business and creating a string of four or five films to build up an already successful franchise is not a bad way to go about making movies.

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