Apr 14 2011
Hail Caesar! ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ trailer hits!
Well hello there, you damn dirty apes!
Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a reboot of the classic sci-fi franchise, just got its first teaser trailer.
The buzz for this movie seems to have popped up from almost nowhere. Of course, that can be mostly attributed to this week’s earlier reveal of the ape effects, done by WETA (Avatar, Lord of the Rings) and the brief clips of Andy Serkis’ sentient simian Caesar glaring out at the internet community with suspicious eyes. Now, the longer trailer is here. So, how does it look? See for yourself
Check the embed below or go watch it directly at Apple:
Incredibly far-fetched right? Beyond the realm of the plausible? Utterly ridiculous. No way is James Franco a brilliant geneticist. No way. As for all that stuff about the primates of the world getting a brain boost and defeating mankind armed only with grunts, feces and bananna peels? I think that’s reasonable.
Seriously, I think this one looks promising. I wasn’t expecting something as grounded in reality (well, to a point) as this one seems to be. The Apes films that have come to us previously, including the original, Burton’s film, and this entries’ most similar relative, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, have all been decidedly campy in one way or the other. Wyatt’s movie, freed from the constraints of the other stories, has some latitutde as it starts at the beginning. And for once, here’s a prequel that has a story to tell.
How did we get to that point where Charlton Heston is on the beach, screaming at a broken Statue of Liberty? The answer here seems to have something to do with Franco’s scientist, his collaborator Frieda Pinto, and a super-smart ape named Caesar. I like the overall look of the film; there’s something less shiny and more straightforward here. Also, the apes in the film are the first iteration, and therefore have no additional human attributes. No Roddy McDowell riding a horse, just armies of angry chimps and gorillas traipsing about the city streets.
If the script can build the same kind of humanity into the critters that WETA has built into Caesar’s eyes, then we might have the best Apes movie since the original. This has just leapt to the top of my most anticipated summer movies.
Apr 14, 2011 @ 19:38:59
This looks like 10 different shades of awful.