By Connor Carlbom

Aurum Staff

So guess what I did? I took advantage of a campus event. When I heard that the free movie at the Elks was going to be Rise of the Planet of the Apes that week, I got interested. When I first saw the teaser I rolled my eyes and thought back to the weird/bad Tim Burton remake a few years ago with Mark Wahlburg, but then I saw the first trailer. It looked pretty good, and so I got confused. I had no idea what to think, and when the opportunity arose to see the movie for free, I took it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes tells the story of a scientist named Will (James Franco) and his fight to end Alzheimer’s with the power of modern medicine. The company he works for uses chimps as test subjects. After some wacky shenanigans, all the apes are put down, except for one baby that Will brings home. Turns out this chimp was affected by the medicine and is now super smart, because the drug accelerates brain regrowth. Will names the Chimp “Caesar” and cares for him like a human child mostly because he is smarter than any human child. Later on, Will marries a woman I think, but that’s not important. What is important is the conflict within Caesar’s head. He begins to wonder why he is treated like a pet. After Caesar attacks Will’s jerk neighbor, he gets sent to an ape rehab center. After talking with a wise old Orangutan, Caesar decides to lead all the apes in the city to freedom in the redwood forests of Northern California.

The apes are by the far the best part of the movie. They are interesting to watch and are pretty relatable. All the major apes have very different personalities so you are never getting them confused for one another. The amazing CGI helps things out a lot as well. For a few moments at the beginning of the movie, I had no idea if what I was looking at was real or not. The story, while not the best in the world, does its job; to move the apes along on a Great Escape style run to the hills, all the while getting you more and more attached to them.

There are a few knocks against this movie that keep it from being “perfect.” The human characters are mostly forgettable stereotypes, with the exception of Will’s father. Sorry Franco, but you got out-acted by a CGI chimp. They force a reference to the original movie; and I hate when any movie does that. It’s not as bad as Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and I don’t even think a majority of the audience picked up on it, so this isn’t a huge deal. This last thing is more of a nit-pick, but oh my gosh there are a lot of apes in this movie. I don’t even think there are that many chimps left in Africa, let alone the San Francisco Bay area, but once again, it’s not a huge deal.

So there you have it. If you are looking to be pleasantly surprised by the next movie you watch, let it be Rise of the Planet of the Apes.