Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Chimpan-tastic!

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20th Century Fox

Academy Award–winning visual-effects house Weta Digital created Caesar, a computer-generated character of unprecedented emotion and intelligence, for Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Apes make great horror-movie monsters, with their big nasty teeth, their crazy shrieks and scary roars, their ability to jump out and go Boo! — but also because they so closely resemble humans that they are our feral siblings from an earlier mother, our funhouse mirror and primitive id. Moviemakers have played on this connection since the first King Kong in 1933, still the cinema's greatest fable of enslaved majesty and doomed love. In the process they have advanced the medium's capacity for magic, from Willis O'Brien's stop-motion Kong to the monkey masks in the 1968 Planet of the Apes to Andy Serkis' motion-capture performance in the title role of Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong.

As both a simian simile and a wonder of technology, Rise of the Planet of the Apes deserves to be in the company of the great original Kong. This year's sixth "origins" story of a fantasy franchise (after The Green Hornet, Thor, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger) is also the year's finest action movie. While preparing viewers for the slam-bang climactic showdown of apes and men on the Golden Gate Bridge, which everyone has seen in the trailers and which is pretty amazing, director Rupert Wyatt summons thrills in more artful fashion: the image of trees silently shedding their leaves — before a hundred apes drop from them to create havoc in a suburban neighborhood — or of the rampaging apes when they invade a zoo, dismantling a large metal fence and using the pickets as spears.

No question, the movie is an astounding triumph of visual effects. Again, Serkis is playing a motion-capture monkey — the prime primate, Caesar — and gives a performance so nuanced and powerful it may challenge the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give an Oscar to an actor who is never seen in the film. Hundreds of apes are onscreen in Rise, but no real ones were in the cast; all are humans, filmed and transformed through motion capture by Jackson's Weta Digital, the effects company that has already won five Oscars (for the three Lord of the Rings films, the Kong remake and Avatar). So no chimps were harmed in the making of this picture. That earned Rise an early rave from the animal lovers at PETA, which proclaimed that the movie "sounds like a great contender for another Oscar for Weta, and perhaps a PETA Proggy Award too."

The nicest surprise is how the husband-wife writing team of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver keeps the movie's genre motor running while creating a plangent parable of parenthood. Scientist Will Rodman (James Franco, back in the land of the living after his spectral appearance as Oscar co-host) has been using apes as test subjects in developing the drug ALZ-112, which he believes may cure Alzheimer's. The disease gnaws at Will's gut: his father Charles (John Lithgow) suffers from it. Will has also adopted Caesar, orphaned when his genetically enhanced mother was killed after running wild at Will's lab; so he is nurturing both his impaired father and the chimp. As Charles disintegrates mentally, Caesar makes prodigious strides; in a lovely scene at the dinner table, Caesar notices that Charles is holding his fork the wrong way and gently reaches over to correct its position.

Caesar is a lithe, bright youngster, both chimp and child. One long, graceful tracking shot shows him in Will's kitchen, swinging on an overhead lamp to reach a cookie jar on a high shelf, then scampering to the hallway, leaping and pulling the cord to the attic trapdoor and vaulting upstairs. His five-year passage from youth to maturity is revealed in another dazzling sequence: on a stroll through Muir Woods, Will unleashes Caesar, and the chimp scampers up a redwood, climbing ever higher in a series of subtle dissolves until, reaching the top of the highest tree and staring across the bay at San Francisco, he is fully grown.

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