BEFORE: Well, at the end of last year I promised you all monkeys, so with "Outbreak" I started to deliver, and tonight I continue the chain. In a way, the "Planet of the Apes" series is responsible for this whole project, in that I had seen most of the films when I was a kid (this was back before even "Star Wars" was a thing) but in 2008 Turner Classic Movies ran all of the films, and I decided to watch the series through, and it all made a lot more sense. "Hmm," I thought, "what other insights can I gain from watching movies in a particular order?" And from such a dangerous thought arose the first Movie Year.
Linking from "Outbreak", Morgan Freeman was also in "Red" with Brian Cox (last seen in "The Campaign")
THE PLOT: A substance, designed to help the brain repair itself, gives rise to a super-intelligent chimp who leads an ape uprising.
AFTER: SPOILER ALERT - if you haven't seen the original "Planet of the Apes", skip a few paragraphs - though you probably know the much-parodied surprise ending, which is part of pop culture by now.
Another thing that arose from watching "Planet of the Apes" as a kid was my love for time-travel movies. The original film featured astronauts who were in suspended animation, traveling near light-speed (which is itself a form of time-travel) so they essentially travel far into the future to a planet where apes act like men, and men are enslaved beasts. Surprise! It's future-Earth, after some kind of apocalypse or plague or general decline in the fabric of civilization. Because apparently after you travel some distance in a spaceship, it turns around (somehow) and heads back home.
The 2nd film in the series, "Beneath the Planet of the Apes", featured this same thing happening to ANOTHER spaceship, and a new astronaut appeared on the "alien" planet - but this film ended with the destruction of the Earth, and the rest of the series backtracked to explain how the apes took over. Two smart apes took off in a spaceship before future-Earth blowed up and they (somehow) went back in time to the early 1970's, as detailed in "Escape from the Planet of the Apes".
Those two apes had a baby, and in the final two films, "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" and "Battle for the Planet of the Apes", that smart chimp baby, Caesar, grew up and led the revolution of the monkeys against humanity. In order to make this all work, the filmmakers in 1972 had to envision the future society of 1991, in which humans had trained apes and monkeys to do all of their menial tasks, like serving meals and sweeping the streets. Umm, yeah, so that happened.
By the fifth film in the series, the production values were a disgrace, the budget was minimal, and the continuity was an absolute mess. The near-future story of ape warfare was told in flashback to apes in the far future, which is a rather confusing framework. How do you tell a story in the past tense when it's set in our future that hasn't happened yet? For this, you really need Douglas Adams' fictional book "Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations", which might recommend using the Future Perfect tense, except that with time travel, the future is rarely proved to be perfect. (Adams' joke, not mine.)
Anyway, what I appreciated about the film series, despite all its fractured continuity and missing explanations, was that it appeared to form a time loop - the astronauts went into the future and caused events that impacted on the past, and those past events seemed to (somehow) create the future that they would later find themselves in. I think. Yes, that's right - if it's not a perfect circle, at least it's a self-explanatory loop. But sending the smart monkey from the future to the past, where he could educate other monkeys, seems like a bit of a cheat. It's a little like having someone from the future use a time machine to go back and give the blueprints of the machine to the inventor of the time machine. Then who really invented/will invent the time machine?
If, however, you're more familiar with the 2001 "remake" of "Planet of the Apes", it was pretty much the original film re-done, even though they said it wasn't going to be. They lied. It also featured the apes running the planet, with little explanation of how it all came to be.
FINALLY, 40 or so years later, some enterprising screenwriter decided to ditch the complexities of time/space travel and came up with another way for monkeys to get smarter. And it seems so simple, as the best story ideas always do in retrospect. A drug company is working on a cure for Alzheimer's, and of course they'd test the drug out on chimpanzees, to see if it could restore the cognitive function that they never had. Wait, what? Look, don't worry about it, it's all very technical, just work with me here. All it takes is one smart monkey, and we've got a potential uprising. And we all know that scientists who test on lab animals are the worst pieces of scum and deserve every bad thing coming their way, even though that process has led to almost every significant medical breakthrough of the 20th century.
When this chimp, also coincidentally named Caesar, is taken away from his adopted "father", and sent to live in a monkey sanctuary, what you get is the ape equivalent of a prison film, where the zookeepers are the hacks and the different apes are like different gangs. Caesar wisely picks a fight with the biggest mofo in the prison yard, and then gets the gorilla to act as his enforcer, and then before long he's smuggling in smokes and running the joint like Andy Dufresne in "The Shawshank Redemption".
Of course, what's a prison film without a breakout, so inevitably the apes get loose, and run wild around San Francisco, the best part of the film. Special effects have come so freakin' far - whatever we can imagine now can appear on film. The original "Planet of the Apes" film, no lie, blew its entire budget on make-up, and was still considered ground-breaking in terms of visual effects. Seriously, I can remember a time when an army of gorillas and orangutans on horseback was just played by a bunch of actors wearing rubber masks and clothing. It's good to live in the future.
Unfortunately, "Rise" is just half of the story. The closing credits feature glimpses of what's to come in next year's "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" (which sort of resembles what I saw in "Contagion" and "Outbreak") and I can't wait. Bring on the evolution revolution.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "Your Highness"), John Lithgow (also last seen in "The Campaign"), Frieda Pinto, Tyler Labine, Tom Felton (last seen in "Get Him to the Greek") and Andy Serkis (last seen playing another ape in "King Kong")
RATING: 7 out of 10 cable cars
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