Lacks development but compensates with suggestive nuance

Rating: 7/10 (3 August 2011)

It's surprising how engaging segments of this film can be, despite its over-reliance on non-verbal display, linear plot developments, and stock personalities; it's precisely the detail lent to non-verbal display, however, that makes the film worth seeing. Primate dominance hierarchies and play behaviour, meticulously rendered emotions—fear and its autonomic signatures (shallow breathing, dilated pupils, etc.--and consciousness-raising depictions of Alzheimer's disease and its impact on loved ones, all go a long way to make the film seem "round" rather than "flat." Surprising touches of nuance pervade the film, actually. Caesar, the intelligent chimp and protagonist, displays his perceptiveness and inward-looking grasp of his circumstances, uses a Chinese fable about strength in numbers and weakness in division to reveal his organizational aspirations, is self-restrained and morally sensitized, etc. Then you have ironically ape-like zookeepers revealing themselves in different ways to be more primate-like than the primates they hold in captivity, etc. One zookeeper, with a simian mien, becomes mesmerized by an evangelical commercial, yet happens also to be more sensible than his stereotypically aggressive colleague.
So the film has its merits and holds attention, but it also has serious weaknesses common to most Hollywood fair, such as an unwillingness to develop characters, inexplicable plot jumps and unrealistic moments defying belief, etc. We should demand more from sci-fi, since the genre is such an excellent vehicle for thought experimentation, and can explore certain social problems in ways non sci-fi can't. So I should think a truly penetrating look at human nature may come from a Planet of the Apes follow-up feature, a film outranking its classic original in psychological depth and structural control. But whether such a production could meet marketing expectations is doubtful by today's standards. Animated chimps and blue humanoids wielding bows and arrows are expected to appeal to the masses, largely for the sake of making money and not telling a rich, philosophically focused story. I can be hopeful, all the same, can't I?
One must, after having watched a film, take stock of its overall 'value' for viewers, despite how a film has made us feel; insofar as lasting value is consideration, Rise of the Planet of the Apes achieves little, because its characters and events lack mimetic relation to experiences in life, as realistically developed over time, as opposed to ample stimuli that we can't help but emote to, since we're viewing primal displays that prompt automatic response. There's little impetus for introspection in this film. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, by contrast--and I use this as an example merely because the title shows up briefly in the film for the namesake of the protagonist chimp--has much more command over the psychological sphere, over what we're experiencing and how we judge others, and what we ought to do about how we feel, within a complex social structure. I was hoping the filmmakers would bring more from Julius Caesar's themes into the film--and the follow-up film may very well evince this, with a chimp revolt of some sort against their leader--but I would expect any relation, at this point, to be only superficial.