Monkey business

Ever feel that Darwin got it backwards? That we’re evolving into apes, and apes are evolving beyond us?

Watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and you might have second thoughts about the “evolution of man” theory.

Based on the Planet of the Apes movie series from the ‘60s and ‘70s, this reboot may raise a few eyebrows among older fans, but it somehow makes perfect sense to a younger audience raised on graphic novels, “origin” movies and sci-fi franchises. Doing away with the ape makeup and deploying “motion grab” technology and CGI instead, it speaks to a new audience who have never heard Charlton Heston’s famous cry, “Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!!”

That cry came from the original 1968 sci-fi classic (based on Pierre Boulle’s novel Monkey Planet) that featured state-of-the-art monkey makeup and a witty script by Rod Serling. The movie was so popular, four sequels followed. POTA fans (like me) collected plastic models, trading cards, comic books. We knew all the trivia. It was kind of our ‘70s Comic-Con fetish.

All that ape mania got swept away, though, by Star Wars, a much more successful (and marketable) sci-fi franchise. But that hasn’t stopped people from resurrecting the original POTA premise. There was Tim Burton’s creaky 2001 remake — not much fun and not very memorable. Better is Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco and Frieda Pinto, which has some of the wit and energy of the earlier movies.

Rather than opening with the original premise — astronauts landing on a planet where apes rule and humans are dumb servants and lab specimens — director Rupert Wyatt’s reboot shows us how the world got turned topsy-turvy, Darwin-wise, in the first place. Thus, it’s a proper “origins” movie: it explains how the world got taken over by monkeys.

In ROTPOTA (I’m already tired of typing out that long title), Franco is genetic scientist Steven Jacobs, testing out a serum he hopes will reverse Alzheimer’s disease (which his father, John Lithgow, has) by spurring cell growth activity. He injects the drug into lab apes with some success, but an ape freakout in the lab leads to a shutdown of the project. Jacobs manages to smuggle home a baby chimp though, and finds it has inherited the drug’s genetic effects through its mom: the ape (whom he names Caesar) is smarter than the average chimp, dresses in clothes and swings around Jacobs’ San Francisco house in a cute and charming way. He also can draw and play chess, knows about 50 words in sign language, and longs for the freedom and great outdoors he sees outside the window of the house’s attic (where he’s kept in secret by Jacobs).

Jacobs shares his secret with veterinarian Caroline (Pinto) in a cute bit where Caesar acts as the scientist’s “wingman,” signing to Jacobs that he should ask her out to dinner. He does, they date, and Caesar grows into a somewhat surly teenage chimpanzee, signing questions to Jacobs about his mother and father, and how he became the way he is.

It has to be said, the CGI ape does a pretty spiffy acting job; or rather, Andy Serkis — who did the “motion grab” work upon which CGI characters like Gollum and others — does. His face and movements are very expressive and intelligent, sometimes more so than Oscar nominee Franco. Caesar still lacks speech, though, which is crucial to enjoying the ironic twists of the Apes series.

All that will come later, no doubt. This reboot has done well with American audiences, so sequels are probably in the offing. There’s a lot to enjoy as a hardcore fan, including frequent references to the old movies: Caesar’s mother is nicknamed “Bright Eyes,” which was Charlton Heston’s nickname in the original POTA; the “stinking paws” cry gets a new, resurrected twist, as does Heston’s original lament: “This is a madhouse! A madhouse!” Those are fun to spot. Also fun are the names of other apes — like Cornelia, apparently a relative of Cornelius, or the orangutan called Maurice — a nod to Maurice Evans, who played Dr. Zaius in the original movies. Geeky fun, but still fun. There’s also some business with the drug company’s name, Gen Sys. It’s a play on the Bible’s “Genesis,” of course, and can also be taken as a reversal of Darwin, with apes emerging as the smarter species. The apes, after all, only get smarter from the experimental serum, whereas human immunity systems break down.

Why is the premise of POTA so enduring? I suspect it has something to do with apes’ similarity to humans. They’re like us, but also different, so it’s fun playing around with the possible twists of a world run by apes.Maybe the appeal of any horror/sci-fi alternate universe is the ways in which the apes/zombies/vampires resemble us, though not quite.

And yet director Wyatt’s reboot isn’t perfect. The love relationship between Jacobs and Caroline really slows things down. (On the other hand, there are way too few females in the movie as it is; one viewer, who notably checks out movies only to appraise the lovely ladies, had this dismissive one-line review: “Lotsa chimps.”) The CGI special effects also threaten to take over at the ending, when the apes go wild. Swinging from the girders of the Golden Gate Bridge, the simians don’t seem as authentically graceful as real apes, and they definitely don’t seem evolved enough to take over the world quite yet. One thinks back fondly on the professional mimes who played the ape-men in the “Dawn of Man” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey — now, those apes kicked ass!

Here, instead, the objective of Caesar, after all his efforts, is apparently to occupy the John Muir Memorial Redwood Forest across the San Francisco Bay. The apes end up climbing those tall redwoods at the end, and it’s a nice image, but it would be lame if the movie ended on that note. Instead, a sly teaser of sequels to come follows, right before the credits, with an infected human boarding an airplane bound for… every inhabited destination in the world.

None of this happened in the original movies of course, but that’s the obvious strength of ROTPOTA: it’s willing to retell the story in a new way for younger audiences, but also smart enough to appeal to the old fans who will recognize all the sly references. Now, that’s evolution.