Director: Rupert Wyatt
Cast: James Franco, Frieda Pinto, John Lithgow, Andy Serkis
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.
Did I Like It: There are three elements of this film—probably the weakest so far of the rebooted Apes series—that stand out to me on this viewing. First, the weakest part of the film is certainly the human element. Franco runs through the movie, vaguely embarrassed to be a vessel for exposition, and the less said about his relationship with Frieda Pinto, the better, if for no other reason than the film itself is absolutely disinterested in the relationship itself. It also doesn’t help that every time the film loses its self control and becomes content to fall into typical reboot tropes of bringing out lines from previous entries, it is usually coming from the incidental human characters. If memory serves, each time it was Tom Felton.
Any film that has a great and growing pandemic as one of its central plot pillars is going to play a little bit differently ten years down the line than it did in those halcyon days of Obama’s first term. That can’t be blamed on the filmmakers, but it can’t be ignored, either. Even odder still, the particular Typhoid Mary in this case—the neighbor (David Hewlett) is played (or at least I react to it) as a perpetually put upon comedic character.
And yet, the film works. Why? Serkis. Better than any other actor in existence, Serkis is able to transmit so much pathos through layers of special effects. He is able to make the childlike Caesar believable, and then subsequently sell Caesar’s journey from trying to join the world of his own kind, his fury at losing everything, and the honest temptation he feels to try to put things back the way they were, regardless of how much that can never happen by the time the film ends. It was the smartest decision to make Serkis’ performance the centerpiece of this trilogy.