Serviceable, but not great

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2012)

I remain a fan of the original Planet of the Apes movies, which, aside from the first one, were slightly cheesy, but remain one of the most inventive franchises yet. I loathed Tim Burton's abortion from several years ago, and had washed my hands of any further attempts to revive the franchise, thinking perhaps the films were, and perhaps ought to remain, firmly rooted in their sociological place in time. But I kept hearing murmurs that this was a good film (one friend called it "the best movie he'd seen all summer") and, well, okay, when it came out I broke down and checked out a copy.
They changed the story little; this is really a revamp of the third movie, Escape From the Planet of the Apes, explaining the genesis of how intelligent apes came to be among us (the original version features a delightfully impossible cause-and-effect loop where intelligent apes sprang from a pair of intelligent apes who traveled back in time). In a nutshell, Dr. Rodman (James Franco) is working on a cure for Alzheimer's when he discovers a concoction that heightens cognitive functions in chimps. When he tests it on his ailing father (John Lithgow), it displays enormous promise, but not as much as it does with little Caeser, a chimp born of their most promising test case. The original batch of super-goo proves unstable, however, and Franco is sacked. Fast-forward a few years (and throw in Frieda Pinto as a love interest, because, hey, she is really really beautiful), and Caesar is now adolescent sized, and incredibly smart. An incident with a snotty neighbor lands him in what is essentially an ape jail (run by Brian Cox and the dude who played Draco Malfoy, so you know it's a bad joint), and Caesar, by dint of his intelligence, takes over the place. From there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to the apes running the planet, although we'll be saving that for future installments (watch the credits, you'll see what I'm referring to).
The Apes movies in their initial run were really more about what humans feared, and apparently in the Seventies what we feared is that we would screw things up and wreck the world and someone else would take our place at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Now that most of that has come to pass (save for the top of the ladder bit), it turns out what we are most afraid of now is that in trying to avert some horrible disease, we will screw things up and wreck the world and someone else will take our place at the top of the evolutionary ladder (well, again, in the next movie they will portray the actual taking our place bit). Whereas in the earlier version of the saga we shot ourselves in the foot with nuclear weapons, here we shoot ourselves in the foot because of greed and big pharma, which again, is a tad more realistic (though nuclear Armageddon was not so far-fetched in 1970). The story approach is different, but the underlying fears remain.
Much like in the original, the human actors are almost completely disposable; we spend a lot of time with Franco, but he could be any well-meaning shmuck, and Lithgow, while he's very good, is merely a maguffin to create the super-ape serum (the rest of the humans, even the radiant Pinto, are utterly forgettable). The take on the apes is different – here they look much more ape-like, and less like humans in prosthetics, although honestly I loved the 60s/70s apes (and so did Oscar, they won an award for inventive make-up). The guy who played Gollum played Caesar as an adult, and of course he's crazy good and convincing in his movements; that helps sell the believability of the film. But even with flawless effects, I felt there was something missing from this version of the story, some element that sold me on the other, admittedly lower-tech and cheesier version, that did not sell me here. Maybe it was the casually boring treatment of man being mean to lower animals, or maybe it was just that it took way the hell too long to get things going; but this movie, while technologically impressive, has no heart. We don't bond with Caesar the way we bonded with Roddy McDowall's version of him; he seems a cold and cunning conqueror, almost more of a villain than a hero (while he rejects the evil humans, naturally, he also rejects the embrace of the one who loves him, which I understood from a plot point but nonetheless found curious). Caesar is less a protagonist to root for than a warning that it will likely be some innocent bystander we hardly give a second thought to who will eventually topple our way of life. He was far too callous for me to embrace. I also didn't care for the slapdash ending, where the apes find temporary sanctuary after besting a squad of policemen. So? The next day they'd simply be gassed, end of story (or it would be if not for the financial allure of potential sequels, which is why they keep trying to revive this franchise).
I didn't find it a bad film, but I did find it an oddly cold and sterile one, and admit to being a tad perplexed as to why, technological achievements aside, everyone seemed so taken with it; granted, we humans are simply living high on the hog in an epoch between glacial periods (most likely), but I don't really find the notion that we will be displaced one that deserves much cheering. I find the whole premise kind of creepy, myself. Maybe without McDowall's humanity underneath it all there's some spark lacking in these new apes – one I would label empathy. You'll certainly be impressed by the effects in this film, but I was left cold by the story.