CAESAR IS HOME

Rating: 10/10 (30 May 2019)

The first thing I wondered was how 300 Spartan apes could defeat the combined armed forces of the world and 8 billion or so humans. The movie never takes us to that point. This film begs for a comparison to the original series as they borrow lines from it. I enjoy this aspect of remakes, but if you have never seen the original you may not be hip to them. The first thing I caught was the first chimp was called "bright eyes" a nicknamed the apes gave to Charlton Heston. The chimp's subsequent escape was similar to the one by Heston. Caesar was the name of the smart ape in the POTA series and likewise his first ever spoken word was "no." A hose was used to punish the ape like it was used on Heston. Two of Heston's lines were spoken by the "jailer." "It's a madhouse!" and "Take your sticking paws off me you..." James Franciscus played in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and James Franco starred in this one and the movie is set in San Francisco. (I am running out of similarities.)
In the original series apes were bred to be pets because a virus had wiped out dogs and cats. This movie uses a virus to make apes smart. Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) plays an excellent "Sean Penn" sadistic punk "jailer" who we all want to see die. (Forgive me, but I think he can act better than Radcliffe.) James Franco and Frieda Pinto were less stellar in their starring roles than was Heston or McDowell. Of course if they wrote them some decent lines...
The apes in this, from what I could tell, were CG and not as life-like as British actors with make-up. The CG baby chimp was perhaps the worst of the lot. Fortunately that didn't last but a few minutes in movie time. During the ape-human conflicts I thought a hip-hop/rap soundtrack i.e. "stick it to the man" type of music would have worked better, (I was humming Eminem) although the producers were most likely afraid of a possible back lash.
The movie was good, but the rave reviews are hyped. Four and a half stars at the most.
No f-bombs, no sex, no nudity, no ape privates showing, no blood splattering, no Linda Harrison running around in a loin cloth. Violence, killing, and use of the word "damn."