Rise Of The Apes: Everything We Know

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.

However, neither Wahlberg nor Burton were much more enamoured with the project than their audience was. Poor old Wahlberg had turned down a part in Ocean’s 11 to take part in the first one, and wasn’t keen on making the same mistake twice. Burton meanwhile, told The Guardian that a sequel could happen, but that he’d “rather jump out of a window” than direct it.

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…

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!

So who was to be charged with bringing it all together? None other than British director Rupert Wyatt, the man behind low-key jailbreak drama The Escapist. Not exactly the obvious choice for a Hollywood blockbuster then, but a good fit for the less hysterical tone that Fox are seemingly aiming for.

Meanwhile, Street Kings writer Jamie Moss was hired to give Scott Frank’s script a fairly vigorous rewrite, before Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (best known for their work on The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) gave it a further polish.

It’s a story that’s had a fair bit of tinkering then, but what’s it all about…

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.

When the medical programme is shut down, Caesar, the ape in question, finds himself banged-up in an animal sanctuary alongside a number of his simian chums. Now Caesar is smarter than your average chimp, and he’s not best pleased to be stuck behind bars. Naturally it’s only a matter of time before he’s whipping up a revolution among his hairy brethren.

All of which sounds fairly similar to what’s gone before, what with human’s heavy-handedness towards animals coming back to bite them on the arse. However, one element of the film will be very different to what has gone before, and that element is the apes themselves…

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?

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…

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…

Lithgow was quick to announce another heavyweight addition to the cast, tweeting that, “Brian Cox will be in the film, he of the big meaty face,” before adding, “usually, there’s only room in a movie for one of us.”

Happily, they’re both on board this time around, with Cox as the movie’s main baddie, a crooked chimp-sanctuary owner who treats his hairy guests with more than a dash of cruelty. We’re thinking a money-spinning deal with a cosmetics company, or something along those lines.

And Cox too will have an on-screen son, in the suitably villainous form of Draco Malfoy himself, Tom Felton. Whether he’ll be as sneeringly nasty as usual is unclear, although it’s more than likely he’ll be in the firing line along with his father as soon as Caesar’s army go ape.

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.

“When I read what the story was about, and the idea of the film is out there,” said Pinto to Earth’s Mightiest, “I really thought that, yes, it was a big budget film and all of that, but it really had a soul in the kind of story that they wanted to put out there. It’s a battle between humans and apes with humans trying to make themselves superior by exploiting another animal.”

Pinto herself is apparently a bit of an animal lover, and the film’s anti-cruelty message was one that she could relate to. “ I just thought that there was a lot of soul to it,” she says. “I also like films with a lot of animals in it, and what happens to animals really does break my heart.”

Hmm, she sounds a bit Miss World there granted, but in all seriousness it’s another exciting bit of casting in what is shaping up to be a cracking little ensemble. Lets just hope there’s no inter-species snogging this time out…

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.

The name “Caesar” is a throwback for starters, already having been used as the moniker for the Che Guevara-esque protagonist of Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes. Sticking with names, his mother is set to be called Bright Eyes, which fans of the original will (ok, might) remember is how Dr. Zira refers to Colonel Taylor.

One slightly more obscure reference (but a pretty cool one nonetheless) is Caesar’s eye colour, which changes as he becomes more evolved. By the time he is fully sentient, his eyes become bright green, a tip of the hat to the green uniforms worn by the apes in the first film.

And if that isn’t explicit enough for you, there is set to be a scene in which Caesar is vigorously hosed down at the animal sanctuary, a direct homage to Chuck Heston’s “it’s a madhouse” gurn-fest. Finally, the tables are turned!

According to Chud.com, the film will boast the standard bleak ending (for humanity at least) beloved of the Apes films. What that might turn out to be is unspecified, but apparently it leaves plenty of scope for a sequel.

Now, the same could arguably be said of Tim Burton’s effort, although the logic there was sketchy at best, and no sequel was forthcoming there. However, would Fox be likely to go to such pains to resurrect the franchise, only to knock it on the head again after one more addition?

The likelihood is that if Rise Of The Apes is any sort of a success, it will pave the way for a whole new set of films, either running in parallel to the originals, or as a prequel saga a la Star Wars.

Like it or not, Fox have got a potential moneyspinner on their hands, but with a talented director in Wyatt, and an excellent cast in place, that may not be such a bad thing…