Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

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As a prequel to an incredibly famous film it had a lot to live up to and also had to maintain interest while the audience knew the direction that the film was moving in. It both explains the genesis of the ape inhabited planet while also creating its own stand-alone film successfully.

This film is dominated by CGI, one of the main characters is a CGI monkey and this can be to the films detriment. The wonderful thing about the Planet of the Apes story is the horror that apes definitely have the strength to overtake humans if they chose to, using CGI creatures makes everything less real. Understandably it would be incredibly difficult, if not cruel, to use real apes during filming however it is still a thought I had during this film. A tip that might help would be not to make the apes impervious to glass as smashing though that many windows would cause some sort of damage.

The cast is good as is the explanatory story; however with James Franco’s kindly character and the way the ape leader (Caesar) is raised in such a loving way it seems odd that Caesar would stage a revolution. This low level of provocation (other than a rather rough Tom Felton) causes the audience to side with the humans (which, due to bias, we would probably do already) and therefore turns the audience into a crowd baying for ape blood. As much as we do not want apes to ape over the planet it is also not nice to want to see animated creatures die.

During the time when Caesar turns from a good ape into a rebel it does seem as though a little communication between him and Franco’s character would have gone a long way to stop the rebellion. It seems as though the writers focused too much on trying to offers a plausible explanation for the Planet of the Apes and therefore it leaves room for there to be plot holes as they are just desperately trying to make their idea work.