Relax, Tim Burton isn't involved...
It’s still difficult to think about the Planet Of The Apes franchise without dwelling on Tim Burton’s disastrous “reimagining” in 2001, so it’s as good a place as any to start the Rise Of The Apes story. If you’ll cast your mind back to the end of that film, you’ll recall the door was left very much open to a sequel, with Mark Wahlberg’s return to earth greeted by a giant statue of Tim Roth’s villainous general.
Nothing much more was said about the matter until, when Fox announced plans to kick-start the franchise with a new prequel to be written and directed by Minority Report scribbler Scott Frank. With the working title Caesar in place, Frank planned to move away from the hammier elements of the series in favour of creating a more cerebral, serious-minded sci-fi picture.
So Fox had their man in place and a new direction in which to take the franchise. That is, they did until May of this year, when it was announced that Frank had left over issues with script and budget, leaving the project indefinitely on hold…
Rupert Wyatt will be behind the camera...
Despite the fact that precisely noone was crying out for another Apes film, Fox were determined to resuscitate the brand, and in June they announced that the prequel was back up and running. Newly dubbed Rise Of The Apes, the film was given an official release date of June 24th 2011, leaving just over a year to get it made!
It's an origin story...
The film will be set in present day America and certainly won’t follow on from Tim Burton’s car-crash, offering instead a new origin story for those damned dirty apes. The film will focus on a piece of genetic experimenting that accidentally imbues its test subject (an ape, in case you hadn’t guessed) with sentient thought.
WETA will create the apes...
That’s right, there will be no monkey-suits this time around! Fox have announced that Peter Jackson’s visual guns-for-hire WETA Digital will be in charge of swapping plastic for pixels in creating a new breed of “photo-realistic” digital apes.
Despite the usual “using the groundbreaking technology from Avatar” bumf that now seems forever destined to follow WETA wherever they go, there are no plans to shoot this one in 3D, although we won’t believe it until the whole thing is in the can. The temptation for Fox to add it in post-production may yet prove too great…
To be honest, we’re in two minds about this element of the film, particularly as Rick Baker’s superb makeup was the one saving grace from Tim Burton’s turkey. If WETA are going to pull of some truly credible apes, they’ll need a motion-capture expert with experience in channelling his evolutionary ancestors. Who could that be then?
Andy Serkis is Caesar...
Yep, no prizes for guessing that one correctly, as Hollywood’s go-to-guy for mo-cap shenanigans will be donning the lycra suit once again. In fairness, we can’t really imagine anyone else playing this role, particularly given Serkis’ previous as King Kong.
That said, the role should give Serkis a full workout, as he’s got to convincingly condense the process of evolution in no more than a couple of hours. The film will chart Caesar’s journey in its entirety, so expect to see Serkis in full on banana-munching mode, before gradually becoming increasingly human-like in his behaviour.
However, whether he will talk or not is another thing entirely. Fox’s Tom Rothman has described the picture as, “a hard science-fiction film,” which is all well and good, until you get to the point where he says that, “the film won’t have talking monkeys and will not end with chimps taking over the earth.”
What? No chimp-chat? We won’t be convinced until we hear it from Wyatt or Serkis. The idea of a Planet Of The Apes movie without giving any of those apes the power of speech would be bold in the extreme, although if Fox want to move away from the original series, that would definitely be one way of doing it. It would certainly ask more of Serkis, although he pulled it off with Kong, so perhaps we shouldn’t rule it out…
John Lithgow and James Franco will play father and son...
Whilst Serkis may or may not be flexing his vocal chords, John Lithgow and James Franco certainly will, as they’ll be heading up the film’s human cast. Franco will play genetic scientist, whose search for a cure for Alzheimer’s leads him to experiment on Caesar and his pals.
The reason behind his vocation? His poor old dad is a sufferer of the disease. Lithgow will play said patriarch, and the actor has been raving about the project via his Twitter account.
Lithgow announced the news with the following message, sounding rather endearingly like an awestruck teenager on his first acting gig: “(The film is) Rise Of The Apes, an extremely smart prequel to Planet etc… (I’m playing) James Franco's dad, how cool is that?
After revealing that his work on the film would be finished as quickly as the end of July, Lithgow went on to gush that, “after a day of pre-production in Vancouver, my head swims. Everything suggests Apes will be completely amazing, and Franco’s a peach.”
Sounds like the chemistry’s in place for some heartstring-yanking father-son moments, as Franco realises his attempts to cure his Pa have put the whole species at risk…
Freida Pinto is the love interest...
While poor old Marky Mark had to make do with of Helena Bonham Carter in a chimp suit by way of love interest (although she did have an unsettlingly attractive something about her…), James Franco has lucked out, with the lovely Freida Pinto cast alongside him as an unfeasibly attractive “primatologist”. And the actress is keen to stress that the film will not be just another dumb blockbuster.
It will be full of references to the original films...
A lot of the noises coming out of Fox seem to be distancing the film from the legacy of the original series, but the chaps over at Chud.com have had a gander at the script, and it seems Jaffa and Silver have been at pains to cram it with plenty of nods to the canon.
