The Academy of Arts and Sciences and all the societies and organizations that give out awards are going to have to initiate a new category: best performance by a non-real character, be it animatronics, character generated, monkey-suited and make up or any other method. Caesar, the lead chimpanzee and breakout star of the film gives a performance equal to the very best in award winners. I can't remember a more emotional, subtle, powerful performance, and without the use of language. Caesar absolutely and completely carries the film. How the special effects brought him and his other non-human primates to life I cannot guess, nor even want to know. What contribution Andy Serkis made to the silent performance ios also a mystery, My disbelief was not only suspended, but flew out the theater door, very early on in the film -- when we are first introduced to the laboratory chimps being experimented on by James Franco in his research for a cure for Alzheimer's disease in a San Francisco Bay Area laboratory. But when Caesar, offspring of one of the unfortunate experimental subjects, takes over the storyline, we are mesmerized by his performance.
Oh, yes, this is a prequel to the original 'Planet of the Apes' (1961), and makes pretty good sense out of how the apes rose to dominance on earth and humans devolved to little more than wild beasts. In the same manner that the asteroid hitting earth 65 million years ago dethroned dinosaurs from their pre-eminent position and allowed mammals to evolve unhampered, something equally drastic would have had to happened in present day earth to upset homosapians' position. Through man's own hubris and sloppiness, life on earth is changed forever. Even Charleton Heston couldn't upset that new order.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Writer: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Pierre Boulle suggested by the novel 'La Planete des Singes'
Cast: James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, David Oyelowo, Tyler Labine, Andy Serkis
Time: 105 muin.
Rating: PG-13
Opening August 5 at the AMC Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki Cinema and San Francisco Centre in San Francisco
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