Cgi simians rule...

Rating: 10/10 (6 August 2011)

This "reimagining" of CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES owes as much to the telemovie A COLD NIGHT'S DEATH and PROJECT X (and 28 DAYS LATER and 12 MONKEYS, among others) as it does to the Arthur P. Jacobs films. Much of what we see here was unimaginable in Jacobs's day- which is exactly what a "reimagining" should strive to do. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES goes where no Apes movie has gone before, with what John Collier in his 1931 novel HIS MONKEY WIFE called "the suggestion that the kingdom of Heaven and Earth was at hand." In a world where a monkey's head was successfully transplanted to another body (in the early 1970s, by a Dr. White) and where signing apes like Koko the gorilla have actually developed their own words (and where, we've just learned, 2700 new records for high temperatures have been broken in July of this year alone), ANYTHING is possible. "An opportunity soon came," Collier wrote in 1931... (On a field trip, once, my class visited the Washington Zoo. There, I saw a caged gorilla. I walked up to the bars and stood staring in at him. He froze; snarled- and then began screaming at the top of his lungs and bouncing off the walls. It was the scariest thing I think I've ever seen in my life. Take it from me: the LAST thing you want to see is an enraged gorilla all up in your grille...) One of the more curious aspects of RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is that, for all the carnage, it's almost BLOODLESS (unlike the original version, which was considered kiddie fare and therefore a bit TOO bloody). All things considered, it's a worthy "reimagining." Great Apes, indeed.