"Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes" - Review

Like the birds, the apes can be pretty scary when they get organised. That's what these opposable-thumb-possessors have got their hearts set on in this prequel to the 1968 Charlton Heston classic Planet of the Apes and its successors. It's a smart and highly entertaining popcorn thriller from British-born director Rupert Wyatt, cheerfully satirical in the tradition of this movie series, yet unpretentious at the same time. Somehow the scratching, screeching chimpiness keeps it down to earth. This is actually one of a startling double-bill of ape-centred films out this week, the other being James Marsh's Project Nim, reviewed below. One is fiction, one fact, but they really are weirdly similar in ideas and narrative.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film in which digital FX technology has now evolved to such an extent that super-intelligent apes can be shown convincingly on screen for the first time. No more dressing up in comedy monkey suits, or as semi-transformed ape characters, such as Helena Bonham Carter's poignant, ridiculous but fondly remembered turn as Ari in Tim Burton's 2001 reboot of the first film. The simian star of this one is Caesar, whose movements and characterisation are provided through motion-capture technology by Andy Serkis, who similarly played the gorilla in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong.

Caesar's mother is one of many primates caught in the jungle and brought to present-day San Francisco, where they are experimented on in the labs of a drug-research corporation that is amoral and profit-driven in the time-honoured manner. There is one terrifically Ballardian scene in which the inmates, driven apeshit by new drugs, smash their way into the sleek boardroom and cause chaos, before being taken down by stun darts. The experimental programme is hurriedly closed down, to the horror of Will Rodman (played by James Franco), a decent, troubled young scientist who has been willing to accept these procedures in the search for an Alzheimer's cure. His poor old dad Charles (John Lithgow), who lives with him, suffers from dementia. Will sneaks a baby chimp home – little Caesar, as it were – and feeds the experimental cure to both the ape and his own dad. Meanwhile, just to keep us in the narrative-saga loop, a throwaway scene reveals that a certain manned space-rocket has blasted off to Mars.

This really is a very enjoyable film: suspenseful and involving, and Caesar is a great character with mannerisms and expressions that are neither simian nor human but bizarrely convincing as a combination of both – dramatically and comically, if not scientifically. Caesar should be absurd, but never at any time will you feel the urge to laugh at him, though you might laugh with him, as he grows up and realises his destiny.

There is unexpected tenderness and also tension in the family scenes in which Will presides over a household in which his father has been gloriously brought back to mental life, and which is also invigorated by the little kiddie chimp swinging around the house. Caesar is almost a son to Will and a grandson to Charles: Will realises that he is lonely, and that of course is where the beautiful veterinarian Caroline (Freida Pinto) comes in.

This prequel does not quite have the scabrous quality of the original 1968 movie, the topsy-turvy world in which apes rule over human slaves, nor its bold racial satire: a suggestion that having set about brutalising and dehumanising the black peoples, racist whites could now be reaping a karmic whirlwind. But there is something transgressive in the story of Caesar's relentless IQ-march, and a radical political education not attributable to the drugs. Locked away in cages with other apes in the hateful primate centre, Caesar achieves a kind of new Spartacist consciousness. He brings his fellow prisoners together, sees how the existing hierarchy is structured, and then moves in as the alpha-ape.

No prequel or sequel to Planet of the Apes can avoid the great statue-shaped shadow of that famous finale, one of the most brilliant endings in Hollywood history. Burton unsuccessfully tried putting a new twist on it. I wondered if Wyatt would try to show us exactly how a certain part of the New York skyline came to be changed. The action takes place in California. Would we be getting over to the eastern seaboard some time before the closing credits? The final scene involves an airport, and I was quite certain I knew what catastrophe was on the cards. But no. Perhaps Wyatt was thinking what I was thinking, and rejected it as too obvious. Well, his monkey business is perfectly acceptable without it.