Rise of the Planet of the Apes was the first installment in the trilogy of Planet of the Apes movies. It also acts as a prequel to the original Planet of the Apes movie. One thing that really surprised me about this movie was for the most part, I was on the side of Caesar.

The Planet of the Apes apocalypse begins with Will, played by James Franco, a scientist who wants to create a drug that will cure his father’s Alzheimer’s. He uses the monkeys in his lab to test the drug, 112, on and soon finds that the drug makes the animals smarter. Sadly, a monkey being used to show off the effects of the drug goes crazy while protecting her baby. Will takes this baby as his own, as the mother dies, and names him Caesar and continues to use the drug on the baby. Caesar becomes smarter than anything Will has seen before but this backfires when he tries to protect Will’s dad in a fist fight with the neighbour.

Caesar is carted off to an animal shelter with other monkeys and mistreated by the workers at the shelter. Overtime he thinks that Will will not return for him and has been betrayed. He groups with the other monkeys in the shelter and steals the drug from Will’s house to make them smart as well. They break out of the shelter and start terrorising San Francisco. It is also found that the next drug they started using on the remaining monkeys in the lab, 113, causes bad reactions in humans including death. Surprisingly it turned out that a drug killed off the human race….not the apes.

In the end Caesar sets up home in the Red Woods a place he visited a lot as a child with Will and this is where the second movie continues.

I never watched this film when it was first released because the concept scared me but now I have watched it I found that this movie was a lot deeper than I could’ve ever imagined. Caesar goes through a lot of trauma with humans throughout the movie from feeling abandoned by Will to the character of Tom Felton spraying him with cold water and electric shocking him. You can kind of see why Caesar did what he did. He didn’t even seem to want to eradicate the human race but rather just live free of them with his monkey allies.

The part of the movie everyone talks about is the NO. That scene gave me goosebumps as it was so powerful. Caesar is an amazing character and the actor behind him is unreal. To see so much character development in an hour and forty five minutes is crazy especially as some films can’t achieve that in under two.

I also loved that the film hinted back to the statue of liberty and the astronauts heading off to Mars, which is obviously important moments from the first film. It tied everything together so well and it all made sense. I also love how it wasn’t the monkeys that killed off the human race, an ending I can imagine a lot of people going to, but instead we were the fault of our own self destruction.

What did you think of Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Did you feel sorry for Caesar?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding