Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Rise of the planet of the Apes - A short review

I stayed loyal to my previous post about being an epitome of laziness during weekends. There was a minor aberration though, in the form of watching a movie on Monday and this happened as i was bored of being lazy and it was a long weekend. Anyways, dragged my friend along to watch the only decent movie on the screens 'Rise of the Planet of Apes' and after 2 hrs I was NOT disappointed. It was one of those bizarre science fiction idea that gets made into a movie with major portions done in CGI. I was initially under the impression that this movie was a prequel to the existing 'Planet of Apes' series, but on the contrary, this movie was intended to be a foundation for an entirely new film series.

The movie is very fresh in its idea and was not preachy like most other movies with tragic science undertones, it simply delved on the point that 'power + cognitive' abilities are the real keys to remain at the top of the food chain. The relationship between James Franco and Caesar the chimp has been portrayed well, but I still felt only a master-pet relationship exhibited there even though the director has tried hard to paint a father-son relation. The chimp's experiences at the primate sanctuary have also been well thought out and its rise from an ordinary house pet to a leader of group is too filmy, if you ask me. It did remind me of all those regional movies where the hero becomes a millionaire from zero in a 4-5min song, the only thing lacking in this movie was the background song sequence! There were lot of logical holes as with any other science fiction movies, for instance only 50 chimps were exposed to this new virus, but towards the end of the movie, there were more than 100 chimps that show thinking capacity and they follow the leader's command through . There was also a sequence where the scientists do not know that the chimp they are experimenting on is actually carrying a baby, I was like, WHAAAAAT ....? You guys didn know this all along????? and believe me, this was the pivotal point from which the story takes off. But on the whole this movie has a good screenplay and didn't make the 2 hrs long and boring.

The entire movie got me into thinking, we humans have become so complacent over our position in this earth that we have become dormant and lost all our animal instincts of survival over the generations of procreation and adaptation. We take it for granted that we will continue to rule the world, but if by some nature's freak accident if we are toppled as the rulers, I think we wont even survive a week in this world. Jurassic Park was a perfect example, it doesnt even need to be a cognitive mammal, a giant carnivore would do. Fantasy eh?

1 comment:

_rootnode said...

//We take it for granted that we will continue to rule the world, but if by some nature's freak accident if we are toppled as the rulers, I think we wont even survive a week in this world.
The day is not far.
Watch out. Don't tell me that you've never been warned ;-)