Movie review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The name of this movie is way too long. However, the movie itself was indeed excellent, just as I was told it would be. I was delighted to see a non-human protagonist done so well. There've been movies with robot protagonists that were done okay, but they were always modeled after humans, so essentially they were just humans in disguises. Caesar, the ape, was not a hairy, primitive human being. He was an intelligent life form all his own. Think about movies that have talking animals in them - they're always basically human. They have human mannerisms, crack human jokes, discuss human mating habits and have human socialization patterns. They're *human*. Caesar had a little of that going on, but he's a chimp. They have very similar patterns to humans anyway. What thrilled me was that he was distinct enough, often enough, to make it clear that similarities aside, he was a CHIMP, not a human in a chimp suit.
Hats off to Andy Serkis for the physical portrayal/motion capture. I want to re-watch the whole damn movie with Serkis and no CGI whatsoever! That said, the CGI was superb. While I was pretty sure right from the outset that every ape in the movie was CGI, I was deriving that from circumstantial cues rather than the images themselves. That is, what I noticed was that chimps wouldn't have stopped in the forest on cue, they wouldn't have provided such nice, clean face shots of alertness, and they wouldn't have dislodged quite so much vegetation in their motion. I wish they'd had more ape-like facial gestures. The monkeys and apes I've seen on TV and in real life do monkey and ape things with their faces that humans don't do. They have a number of semi-subtle displays (if you know to look for them, they're not subtle at all; but until I had the behaviors called out to me, I missed them entirely).
Racism Watch
I read a review where the reviewer made a big deal of the chief bureaucrat being black, saying his race mattered a lot in the film. It didn't matter a whit. I'm trying to figure out what the reviewer was even getting at. It was a very white film, like most Hollywood products. It's set in San Francisco. The chief bureaucrat was black, the female love interest was Indian (as far as I can tell), and a landlady was black (if I remember right). Everyone else - neighbors, cops, pilots, board members, scientists, cab drivers, folks stuck in cars on the freeway, people working at the ape sanctuary, families they ran into in the park - was white as far as I remember. No Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, blacks, or people of unknown but non-white ancestry. Which was actually a bit weird.
Sexism Watch
Eh. Just as the film was very white, it was also very male. The only female that had much of a role was the love interest and her only function in the show seemed to be to give Franco's character a human relationship to distract him from Caesar. Not that she was a bad person in any way, or that I object to how she was shown. It's sort of like the racism thing - if there are NO minorities shown - then their very invisibility makes it hard to point and say much bad about how the show portrayed race issues. Same with sexism. Nearly all the meaningful characters were male, so it's tough to say anything at all about women in the show. The one who was there was needed to explain, in a way that didn't make Franco unsympathetic, that there was a gulf between him and Caesar that wasn't going to be bridged. Franco had family, mates, a job and presumably friends. Caesar had none of these until he created his own ape society.
Something related to the Sexism watch and the CGI was the disturbingly Ken-doll-like bodies of the apes. There were no penises. While I don't need to see that, I think it would have added impact to their animalistic and brutish nature, and lent a slightly different emphasis to Caesar wearing pants as he did through most of the movie. If he wore pants and the other apes didn't, that would have showed something about who he was. Also, the lack of penis/mammaries/sexual cues of any kind made the apes weirdly unisex and they tended to code as all male. All of the apes of any interest (Rocket, Buck, the circus orangutang, Kona) were stated to be male (or in the orangutang's and gorilla's cases, had the facial structures and physique of males). So again, females were invisible. There was a point at the end where I saw a couple infants clinging to the backs of chimps.
The apes did have an emotional make-up that was, for my tastes, too similar to that of humans. They didn't have human goals though and that made up for it a lot. They didn't want to become human. They weren't necessarily going to create a human society. (Though I wouldn't kvetch if they did, because clearly human society is the most obvious thing for them to model themselves off.)
The movie left a lot of things open for speculation. I loved the little nod tucked in there to the other Apes movies with the launch of the manned space exploration. I liked imagining that the virus that spread through the human population might intellectually neuter them and/or render them incapable of speech. So that a handful of centuries down the line, when a "modern" human returns and can speak, the apes are all taken aback by it. I liked imagining that as the virus spread through humans, the humans would also unwittingly spread it to the apes wherever they were, creating colonies of smart apes that could begin the process of building a new civilization. I like thinking about what form that civilization would take, if you had a few tens of thousands of apes on the entire planet, with the infrastructure of human cities to work with and only a small proportion of the human population (and a stupid, bestial version of humans too) to worry about.
It was a fascinating movie. There aren't many movies that move me to consider writing fanfic for them, but this one did.
Hats off to Andy Serkis for the physical portrayal/motion capture. I want to re-watch the whole damn movie with Serkis and no CGI whatsoever! That said, the CGI was superb. While I was pretty sure right from the outset that every ape in the movie was CGI, I was deriving that from circumstantial cues rather than the images themselves. That is, what I noticed was that chimps wouldn't have stopped in the forest on cue, they wouldn't have provided such nice, clean face shots of alertness, and they wouldn't have dislodged quite so much vegetation in their motion. I wish they'd had more ape-like facial gestures. The monkeys and apes I've seen on TV and in real life do monkey and ape things with their faces that humans don't do. They have a number of semi-subtle displays (if you know to look for them, they're not subtle at all; but until I had the behaviors called out to me, I missed them entirely).
Racism Watch
I read a review where the reviewer made a big deal of the chief bureaucrat being black, saying his race mattered a lot in the film. It didn't matter a whit. I'm trying to figure out what the reviewer was even getting at. It was a very white film, like most Hollywood products. It's set in San Francisco. The chief bureaucrat was black, the female love interest was Indian (as far as I can tell), and a landlady was black (if I remember right). Everyone else - neighbors, cops, pilots, board members, scientists, cab drivers, folks stuck in cars on the freeway, people working at the ape sanctuary, families they ran into in the park - was white as far as I remember. No Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, blacks, or people of unknown but non-white ancestry. Which was actually a bit weird.
Sexism Watch
Eh. Just as the film was very white, it was also very male. The only female that had much of a role was the love interest and her only function in the show seemed to be to give Franco's character a human relationship to distract him from Caesar. Not that she was a bad person in any way, or that I object to how she was shown. It's sort of like the racism thing - if there are NO minorities shown - then their very invisibility makes it hard to point and say much bad about how the show portrayed race issues. Same with sexism. Nearly all the meaningful characters were male, so it's tough to say anything at all about women in the show. The one who was there was needed to explain, in a way that didn't make Franco unsympathetic, that there was a gulf between him and Caesar that wasn't going to be bridged. Franco had family, mates, a job and presumably friends. Caesar had none of these until he created his own ape society.
Something related to the Sexism watch and the CGI was the disturbingly Ken-doll-like bodies of the apes. There were no penises. While I don't need to see that, I think it would have added impact to their animalistic and brutish nature, and lent a slightly different emphasis to Caesar wearing pants as he did through most of the movie. If he wore pants and the other apes didn't, that would have showed something about who he was. Also, the lack of penis/mammaries/sexual cues of any kind made the apes weirdly unisex and they tended to code as all male. All of the apes of any interest (Rocket, Buck, the circus orangutang, Kona) were stated to be male (or in the orangutang's and gorilla's cases, had the facial structures and physique of males). So again, females were invisible. There was a point at the end where I saw a couple infants clinging to the backs of chimps.
The apes did have an emotional make-up that was, for my tastes, too similar to that of humans. They didn't have human goals though and that made up for it a lot. They didn't want to become human. They weren't necessarily going to create a human society. (Though I wouldn't kvetch if they did, because clearly human society is the most obvious thing for them to model themselves off.)
The movie left a lot of things open for speculation. I loved the little nod tucked in there to the other Apes movies with the launch of the manned space exploration. I liked imagining that the virus that spread through the human population might intellectually neuter them and/or render them incapable of speech. So that a handful of centuries down the line, when a "modern" human returns and can speak, the apes are all taken aback by it. I liked imagining that as the virus spread through humans, the humans would also unwittingly spread it to the apes wherever they were, creating colonies of smart apes that could begin the process of building a new civilization. I like thinking about what form that civilization would take, if you had a few tens of thousands of apes on the entire planet, with the infrastructure of human cities to work with and only a small proportion of the human population (and a stupid, bestial version of humans too) to worry about.
It was a fascinating movie. There aren't many movies that move me to consider writing fanfic for them, but this one did.