Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Remains The Century’s Strangest Franchise Starter

The Planet of the Apes is simultaneously a classic of science fiction and a relic of the decade that produced it. While influential and well-regarded, the 1968 film is likely better known to at least one generation as the source material of a Simpsons parody that mocked its hokey premise and overwrought acting. That the franchise had last produced a lousy fourth sequel in 1973 and a bizarre 2001 reboot made the decision to not only re-reboot it, but start with a prequel, tolerable — even logical.

But the obvious question faced by Rise of the Planet of the Apes when it came out 15 years ago today, aside from how to market such a clunky title, was how, exactly, the apes would rise. It found an answer, but at a cost.

The fault lies, as it so often does, with James Franco. His corporate chemist, Will Rodman, is obsessed with curing the Alzheimer’s disease that’s taking his father from him, and the injection he’s working on, ALZ-112, shows promise. Not only does it make a test ape more intelligent, but his secret experiment on dad works, too. That the ape goes bananas puts ALZ-112 on ice, but Rodman keeps plugging away in secret while raising Caesar, the chimp’s child.

Caesar keeps getting smarter, but ALZ-112’s human impact recedes, and Will’s dad regresses. As Will’s profiteering boss goes ahead with a more aggressive iteration of ALZ, Rodman learns that it’s a bad idea to keep a growing chimpanzee in the house regardless of how intelligent he is. One assaulted neighbor later, Caesar ends up at an ape sanctuary where he plots to win over his fellow primates and spring them from the monkey hoosegow.

All of this produces a film that’s sometimes moving and sometimes extremely silly. It was a risky choice to center a $93 million movie on a mute character, but Andy Serkis and the VFX team sell Caesar as a curious and thoughtful creature who’s coming into his own as a sentient being. Still, you can’t help but wonder how Caesar ended up at an ape sanctuary staffed by people who hate apes, to say nothing of how Rodman was unlucky enough to have a neighbor willing to assault a chimpanzee, his elderly father, and a stranger — Rodman’s lab partner — who had the audacity to knock on Rodman’s door.

We don’t want to get into CinemaSins territory here, but it’s difficult to write a story when you know the conclusion before you develop the premise, and Rise needed to give us a planet run by apes, no ifs, ands, or buts. Planet of the Apes is hardly some unimpeachable classic, but it is undeniably about something. While some of the sequels and TV spinoffs used the franchise to explore the racial issues of the 1970s, and Lord knows what Tim Burton’s reboot was trying to say, the original movie is laser-focused on the threat of nuclear holocaust. The apes feared they would become as destructive in fiction as we worried we were becoming in reality.

If there was a central issue dominating our psyches in 2011, Rise didn’t find it. Is it trying to say something about man’s capacity for cruelty? Kind of, but having an animal-abusing Tom Felton say, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” is an approach that veers into Troy McClure territory. Is it advocating for animal rights? Sort of, in fits and starts. The United States still allows testing on primates, including 163 chimpanzees, but “relatively humane experiments to eliminate a devastating disease” isn’t exactly a sinister Umbrella Corporation plot. Caesar is only saved to begin with by an act of kindness, one that ultimately spirals into a virus that elevates apes but wipes out most of humanity. That’ll learn us.

It all makes Rise feel like a movie in search of ideas beyond “Look, we really want to reboot this franchise.” It’s a weirdly misanthropic film, one less concerned with any particular issue than in implying that humanity has fundamentally bad vibes. Rodman’s girlfriend warns him that he’s “trying to control things without knowing how they work” and that “some things aren’t meant to be changed,” but those are statements so vague they could be grafted onto any sci-fi movie. That Rise is forced to take humanity’s doom for granted only makes it a compelling apocalypse drama for those of us prognosticating online that everything from climate change to AI has already triggered our irreversible demise, leaving us to morosely play out the string.

It almost might have worked better as a standalone film — Free Monkey — than as a series starter. And yet it all worked anyway, or at least it worked well enough to produce three sequels that range from good to great. The modern Ape films are among the most successful reboots in movie history, and while Rise is the weakest of the bunch, it’s still necessary viewing for appreciating them. That raises the uncomfortable question of whether we need a science fiction movie to say anything to be good. Maybe sometimes us apes just like watching the pretty pictures.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is streaming on Disney+.