Among the trillions of binary digits skittering across screens this summer, a vibrant minority have been gathered into a shrewd, coherent, and fully felt movie. I’m speaking of the expertly crafted “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” by far the best spectacle movie of the season, and one of the few films to use digital technology for nuanced dramatic effect.
“Planet,” of course, draws on the old species-reversal conceit worked out by Pierre Boulle in his 1963 novel, “La Planète des Singes,”a book that launched a cluster of movies and television shows, most notably Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Planet of the Apes” (1968). In that mock epic, the manacled, nearly naked Charlton Heston is rated an interesting specimen by a variety of simian overlords.
The new movie draws not only on Boulle’s outrageous idea but on some of the most enduringly suggestive fables we know. It begins as a benevolent version of the Frankenstein story. Will (James Franco, trying harder than usual)， a young genetic engineer working for a San Francisco biotech company, creates a serum that reverses brain damage. (He wants to treat his father, Charles—played movingly by John Lithgow—who has Alzheimer’s。) The company tests the serum on apes, one of which goes mad and has to be destroyed. But Will takes home the ape’s baby, Caesar, who has inherited his mom’s supercharged gray matter, and he and Charles raise him as a pet.
Caesar swings through the house, leaping up and down stairs and throwing himself in and out of the attic, but he sits quietly at the dinner table, too. He listens, he grunts, he eats, he makes signs. He’s a darling little there’s a joke buried in our wonderment: we all anthropomorphize our pets, finding spirit, even conscience, in beautiful collies, in cool, blue-eyed Siamese cats, in potbellied pigs. Out of affection, we see what we want to see of Caesar really is like us, in many ways.
He plays and chatters like a chimp, but, like a child, he needs protection and reassurance, and then—a fellow-primate to the rescue—he rushes to the defense of Charles, his ailing “grandfather,” when he’s attacked by a neighbor. An empathic ape! The screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, and the director, Rupert Wyatt, create many small gestures, glances, and pauses that anchor the improbable turns of the one point, Charles, confused, holds a fork by the wrong end, and Caesar slowly, gently takes it out of his hand and turns it around. The scene is ineffably, absurdly touching, the sweetest expression of family love seen in recent Boulle’s novel was sardonic, even maliciously satirical—science fiction with a tickle. But “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” discovers a new emotion: what you’d have to call interspecies pathos.
Andy Serkis, who was the emaciated, depraved, ground-hugging Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, plays Caesar—that is, he lends his body and face, covered with reflective markers, to image-makers who then, employing the techniques of motion capture, create a digitized simulacrum of an ape, but an ape that has unrivalled flexibility and expressiveness. The filmmakers have pulled off a stunning paradox: Caesar is much more human than an entirely digitized creation, and much more apish than an actual ape—faster, stronger, more exuberant in his knuckle-dragging, chin-thrusting, lunging glory. Caesar becomes an adolescent; hormones kick in, and he turns violent, doing bongo numbers on his enemies with his fists. At last, digital fantasy means something: we are not watching a dull-brained superhero banging off walls like a fly in a bottle; we are watching an animal with suddenly enhanced powers who still behaves recognizably like an animal. But a juiced-up ape can become something more than fun for us—he can shock us with his power, even inspire ’s a premonition early in the film: when a leashed German shepherd barks at Caesar, he roars back at the dog, and then, climbing into Will’s car, surly and sad, he signs with his hands that he feels like a pet—it’s a complaint, a question, and a challenge.
A second fable moves into place. The violent Caesar gets sent to an ape compound, where he’s forced through steel mazes, prodded, and stun-gunned. The imprisonment is unbearable: he experiences the humiliation that a mere dumb animal would never , orangutans, and other chimps live with him in the compound, and Caesar quickly becomes a leader of apes. For a while, the movie turns into the latest version of “Escape from Alcatraz,” reaching its climax in a single syllable, a roaring “No!”—Caesar’s first word, a refusal that caused the audience when I saw the movie to go ape.