Robb Reid's Blogging Life

Like everyone who first hears they are making a prequel to the modern retelling of The Planet of the Apes, I expected crap.  Tim Burton’s made weird movies but most can stand on artistic merit if nothing else.  You’d be stretching the meaning of artistic merit if you tried to apply the to his Planet of the Apes.  A prequel built on a foundation of crap will stink just as bad.

Then the reviews came out.  Top critics didn’t hate it.  Some liked it.  Some loved it.  Has the world gone mad?  A friend’s conspiracy theory is that The Man has gotten to the critics… all of them. He might be right.  But even if that’s the case I should honor their elaborate con by seeing it.

So I did.  I saw the movie that no one wanted and would have been an awesome punch line in reviews of Tim’s monkey movie.  It’s pretty good.  Franco is convincing by repetition that the character he plays does not have any way of displaying emotions.  That actually goes against most acting disciplines, but it really works for Franco and the character he portrays.  But the star of the show are the apes.

The apes (which came in a variety of species) were the stars of the show.  These apes looked like apes.  They were convincing.  Caesar the main ape the movie follows is masterfully portrayed in CGI.  Wow have we come far.  They even gave the sentient apes human looking eyes.

The story is fun to follow and even though I knew where and how it was going I wanted to see it through to the end.  I can definitely tell why PETA endorses this movie.  It’s very pro animal.  But it at least didn’t go to the easy way out and make Monkies good, Humans Bad the theme.  And I thanked the movie for that.  Do I need to see a sequel?  No.  I think I can guess what happens.  I don’t need a prequel sequel – I’m good.