The other Caesar : Watching Apes
May. 29th, 2023 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDuring the last month, I had the chance to do something for my knowledge of recent sci fi dystopias and watched the Planet of the Apes reboot movies. (Yes, I am familiar with the Heston movie and the second one of the sequels.) Now I wish someone had told me that Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake (which is awful) has actually nothing to do with the subsequent movies (which are very watchable), because it doesn't, not at all. (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, which work as a trilogy, are if anything prequels to the 1960s movie.) Then I would have skipped it. Mind you, the Burton movie isn't claw-your-eyes-out kind of awful, but it does fall in the "how to do an adaption which feels more dated than a movie from the 1960s starring Charlton Heston" category. Case in point: in the 1960s Planet of the Apes, the female ape Zira is a scientist. She's played by an actress, but her ape makeup doesn't try to make her look more "feminine". Meanwhile, Burton has Helena Bonham Carter - in a movie from 2001 - wear lipstick and eyeshadow as the female ape Ari, who doesn't seem to have any job but is a "senator's daughter" who feels that human are getting a rough deal. In conclusion: if you want to watch a more recent take on the whole "apes become the dominant species" premise, forget about this one.
On to the good stuff, i.e. the Caesar trilogy. One of the reasons why I watched these movies at all is that in the last decade, I had every now and them come across some good noises in general osmosis, and once I'd completed Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I knew why. For starters, it has Andy Serkis doing his Andy Serkis thing of breathing visceral life into a GCI creature. The credits of Rise have James Franco go first, but he's honestly just the decoy, almost but not completely like Janet Leigh in Psycho (no, he does not die in the shower, or elsewhere, but he does fade into the background after a certain point); here as in the subsequent movies, the Serkis-played Chimpanzee Caesar is the main protagonist. Also, the film commits to its emotional hooks, whether it's the cross species bonding or the horror of imprisonment or the adrenaline of a prison break/escape sequence which is one of the best I've seen. Moreover, it does the smart new adaption/reboot/whatever you want to call it thing considering that fears have changed. The famous twist ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie - Heston's character realising he's been on Earth all along, and that humanity managed to destroy itself in what he assumes was a nuclear war - worked so well partly because it was produced with the Cold War going on, and nuclear armageddon a very real prospect. Whereas when Rise was made, it wasn't anymore. (Those were the days.) But you know what increasingly, even then, became a very real fear? A global pandemic. Also, Alzheimer's. And of course, the debate of the ethics of animal experimentation has only intensified since the 1960s. The film manages to connnect all this in a very efficient way.
Which isn't to say one couldn't nitpick in this movie, and I don't mean the science. None of these three films put its female characters through the indignity of Bonham Carter's make up, but the trilogy is awfully gender essentialist in a more subdued way. Female characters are invariably kind and compassionate and nurturing and without the narrative attention the male characters get, even when they're played by Keri Russell (in the second movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). They're the love interest of the male characters, and that is their function. Meanwhle, the male characters, both the simian and the human ones, are the ones who drive the plot forward, get character development and form bonds (or become enemies). This doesn't mean I dislike the movies - I mean, Lawrence of Arabia, which hasn't a single female character, none at all, is one of my favourite movies, but I did notice.
On to the good stuff again. While the human characters change (that's not a spoilier - I mean, the very premise of the franchise demands it), there are characters other than Caesar who are in all three movies, and the most endearing of them is Maurice, a former circus orang utan. If because he slides into the older mentor role in the first movie you've mentally marked him for the standard mentor of hero fate, you'll be pleasantly surprised. The movies also get better with their villains. The ones in Rise are Evil McEvil types, which works in that they're mere plot devices, but the one in Dawn is the Killmonger/Magneto of the Apeverse, and the one in War turns out to have a pretty good Freudian exvcuse, too, without being less of a villain for it. Speaking of the last movie, I pushed watching it away because the one line description made me believe it's one endless big battle film, which I wasn't really interested in, and then the first ten minutes made me groan and say "oh no, not that trope, must you?" but while the dreaded trope was used, the results were not what I had feared and the movie wasn't about some gigantivc apes vs humans battle, either; instead, thankfully the scriptwriters knew what made their audience care were the characters and so we get lots of intense character scenes instead of what I feared we'd get.
All this said, the trilogy stays true to its B-movie roots. High brow, it's not, and you better not think of the logicistics of working cars run on petrol twelve years after any new petrol got produced, or stuff like that. But it has heart, and despite, with the exception of the first one, being set in a post apocalyptic future, it's oddly optimistic about the power of friendship and community. I definitely enjoyed watching it.
P.S. The Keri Russel factor in Dawn did make me wonder how Elizabeth and Philip would fare in this verse. You could easily write a fusion where they're tasked with stealing James Franco's research and then they realise what the end result could be - The Americans actually did a similar plot line in one of its later seasons. Also, you just know either Paige or Henry would catch the damn virus.
On to the good stuff, i.e. the Caesar trilogy. One of the reasons why I watched these movies at all is that in the last decade, I had every now and them come across some good noises in general osmosis, and once I'd completed Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I knew why. For starters, it has Andy Serkis doing his Andy Serkis thing of breathing visceral life into a GCI creature. The credits of Rise have James Franco go first, but he's honestly just the decoy, almost but not completely like Janet Leigh in Psycho (no, he does not die in the shower, or elsewhere, but he does fade into the background after a certain point); here as in the subsequent movies, the Serkis-played Chimpanzee Caesar is the main protagonist. Also, the film commits to its emotional hooks, whether it's the cross species bonding or the horror of imprisonment or the adrenaline of a prison break/escape sequence which is one of the best I've seen. Moreover, it does the smart new adaption/reboot/whatever you want to call it thing considering that fears have changed. The famous twist ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie - Heston's character realising he's been on Earth all along, and that humanity managed to destroy itself in what he assumes was a nuclear war - worked so well partly because it was produced with the Cold War going on, and nuclear armageddon a very real prospect. Whereas when Rise was made, it wasn't anymore. (Those were the days.) But you know what increasingly, even then, became a very real fear? A global pandemic. Also, Alzheimer's. And of course, the debate of the ethics of animal experimentation has only intensified since the 1960s. The film manages to connnect all this in a very efficient way.
Which isn't to say one couldn't nitpick in this movie, and I don't mean the science. None of these three films put its female characters through the indignity of Bonham Carter's make up, but the trilogy is awfully gender essentialist in a more subdued way. Female characters are invariably kind and compassionate and nurturing and without the narrative attention the male characters get, even when they're played by Keri Russell (in the second movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). They're the love interest of the male characters, and that is their function. Meanwhle, the male characters, both the simian and the human ones, are the ones who drive the plot forward, get character development and form bonds (or become enemies). This doesn't mean I dislike the movies - I mean, Lawrence of Arabia, which hasn't a single female character, none at all, is one of my favourite movies, but I did notice.
On to the good stuff again. While the human characters change (that's not a spoilier - I mean, the very premise of the franchise demands it), there are characters other than Caesar who are in all three movies, and the most endearing of them is Maurice, a former circus orang utan. If because he slides into the older mentor role in the first movie you've mentally marked him for the standard mentor of hero fate, you'll be pleasantly surprised. The movies also get better with their villains. The ones in Rise are Evil McEvil types, which works in that they're mere plot devices, but the one in Dawn is the Killmonger/Magneto of the Apeverse, and the one in War turns out to have a pretty good Freudian exvcuse, too, without being less of a villain for it. Speaking of the last movie, I pushed watching it away because the one line description made me believe it's one endless big battle film, which I wasn't really interested in, and then the first ten minutes made me groan and say "oh no, not that trope, must you?" but while the dreaded trope was used, the results were not what I had feared and the movie wasn't about some gigantivc apes vs humans battle, either; instead, thankfully the scriptwriters knew what made their audience care were the characters and so we get lots of intense character scenes instead of what I feared we'd get.
All this said, the trilogy stays true to its B-movie roots. High brow, it's not, and you better not think of the logicistics of working cars run on petrol twelve years after any new petrol got produced, or stuff like that. But it has heart, and despite, with the exception of the first one, being set in a post apocalyptic future, it's oddly optimistic about the power of friendship and community. I definitely enjoyed watching it.
P.S. The Keri Russel factor in Dawn did make me wonder how Elizabeth and Philip would fare in this verse. You could easily write a fusion where they're tasked with stealing James Franco's research and then they realise what the end result could be - The Americans actually did a similar plot line in one of its later seasons. Also, you just know either Paige or Henry would catch the damn virus.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-29 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-30 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-30 03:56 am (UTC)I often do better with movies without female characters than movies where the female characters are the plot equivalent of arm candy.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-30 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-30 06:34 am (UTC)Technically The Flight of the Phoenix (1956) has one female character in the form of the hallucinated belly dancer, which is about as plot eye candy as you can get, but, as discussed, I love that film.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 10:29 pm (UTC)