The Triumph of the Apes: All Bow Ye Before the Imminent Simian Singularity

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, review.  B - , 3.5/5*  80% Tomato Meter. 

First, this is a good movie.

I've seen several big blockbusters this year, and haven't had the energy to give them the pannings they deserved here.   They - Fast Five, Thor, Captain America, so forth - have been mostly crap.  I've only bothered to review movies that really impressed me here.   I decided the other day that I'm going to try to review everything I see from now on, keeping the less interesting stuff to a paragraph long review..  I need material for the blog (I feel your ravenous need, my public.. )  and the writing exercise will be good for me..

Anyway, I liked Thor mildly, because there was enough of the Eddas there to make it interesting to me, but the rest - I say "rest" because there were more than those other two, but I can't remember them since they were all such innocuous crap that I've purged them - were just awful.  Captain America  I had hopes for, but it was just a blur of mindless and uninteresting violence.  There was never a second that the "good guys" seemed at all likely to be frustrated let alone defeated, and the "bad guys" were clownish, imitation Nazis that were totally uninteresting.

Captain America had certain salient thematic elements in common with Planet of the Apes though..  Very interesting ones, to my mind, these days..   I'll write about them soon.. I'll definitely get to drawing comparisons and all that in a later post.  

Here I need to praise this film a little more.  This movie was smart by Hollywood standards, and the computer effects were absolutely amazing.  I usually dislike CGI effects, but the quality of the apes' depiction was superb, I occasionally even briefly thought that I could actually be looking at film of real hyper intelligent apes.   The level of verisimilitude is becoming almost lifelike.  

"Virtual reality" is making great strides, folks.  The fantasy almost leaps off the screen into life..    

The actor who played Gollum in LOTR, Andy Serkis, also played the lead ape in this film, Ceasar, and this performance was just as good as that one, but even more impressive as the computer effects are even better.  

So, the story was above average for a blockbuster, it held my interest, and while there were few surprises in the story, but it was executed well, and did everything I came wanting it to do.  It had moments of tension where there was true suspense (albeit all while knowing what was going to happen ultimately) ..

About the theme, now:  

It's an old one in cinema.  Basically, it's a gnostic dystopia.  The main human character, played by 

is a scientist whose father has Alzheimers.  He is driven to find a cure.  He is working on a viral treatment that he expects to cure brain damage caused by dementia.  They test it on a dozen apes..

And discover that it works.  But better than expected, in that it increases intelligence. 

The only surprise here (I'm not going to tell you the rest of the plot, you can guess what happens) is that the only appealing human beings in the film are James Franco's character, his character's girlfriend, and his father (John Lithgow).   All the other humans are assholes.  

The apes - Ceasar, the main ape especially - seem at first to be all cruel.. But, as the plot unfolds, they are revealed to actually be quite noble, in that they only kill humans who are begging for it.  

The rest of the human race is taken out .. Do not read the next sentence - I've written it backwards - if you want to be "surprised" :

.suriv eht yB 

So, the stage is set for the triumph of the apes, and the arrival of Charleton Heston.  His character is actually in the film, too, but referred to only tangentially.  (There are a few media reports in the movie telling us that a Mars mission launches, but then disappears.. ) There are a whole slew of tribute lines and names to the earlier film series, of course.   They're going to treat us to a new franchise, which I can't say I mind, so long as they keep doing it this well.  

Now, the message here in philosophical terms is that nothing essentially separates apes and men but intelligence, that by attaining greater intelligence is essentially a technical problem itself "solved" by intelligence, and that the super intelligent product of that innovation benefits from the extermination of stupid humanity by means of a ..  (backwards agin, don't look if you don't want to learn..) 

suriv..

Yeah.  Prophecy of the Illuminati, or just the rehash of really stale plot line?

You decide.   One species of apes is done, long live the reign of the more evolved apes!  

Evolution is inexorable, and you who are stupid cannot escape.

But the singularity isn't happening this week, in the meantime you get to go to the moves.  Enjoy.

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