It’s been some time since my scrawls appeared here. My current laptop, the sad dried up old sow that she is, started getting chest pains recently, and I’m squeezing the last drips of life from her whilst saving up for the kind of rig that will surely be in the first wave when machine sentience becomes fashionable. Patience.
I’m glad that the ‘good movie with a bad title’ trend is creeping back. If I try to recommend movies like Robocop or Starship Troopers to anyone who has, somehow, not yet witnessed their majesty, the response is generally the kind of grimace reserved for that exact moment you feel a small dog’s body yield under the weight of your back tyre. They can’t be blamed. Nor can I for rolling my eyes at the prospect of watching this. The original was already too dated for my eyes when I came of optimum movie age, and the more recent ‘reimagining’ [seriously, fuck Tim Burton] disgusted me with its undercurrents of bestiality* and overall atrociousness. *Helena Bonham Carter is a moon-faced cunt.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes had yet another hurdle to cross in the form of yet another recent trailer that sets it up as the wrong kind of movie. The actual rising of said apes is not made clear until a mid-credits scene, where the penny dropped and bounced off the tip of my shoe as I stumbled to pick it up. I wouldn’t have given the whole ‘rising’ part much thought if it weren’t for the movies title and marketing campaign and, indeed, the realisation that the entire film is a precursor to apes on horseback netting up humans would have been a twist of legend. But marketing the story of a clever chimpanzee getting somewhat annoyed at humanity would have been a bit of a nightmare.
For all his scowling and shouting in the trailers, poor old James Franco is playing second fiddle to a mo-cap chimp and, while the aforementioned preview clips focus on the ninja-shaming acrobatics of the apes, there are plenty of full scenes that rely almost solely on the effects themselves to generate long periods of emotion. That this has been achieved is without doubt. The filmmakers could easily have focused more of the close-up shots on the humans, with an obligatory chimp gurn interspersing the shots just to remind you he’s in the background, perfectly aware and fucking furious. But choosing to lean heavily on the power of facial capture technology has worked a treat, and showcases the effects in a way that tree swinging just can’t match. If the same techniques had been applied to the dead-eyed characters in Polar Express or Beowulf, we’d have a couple of modern horror classics on our hands, but perhaps the next logical step to photo realistic faces was waiting all this time for the kind of face we understand, but don’t necessarily have to look at day in, day out.
Aside from a capable but otherwise by the numbers Franco, there’s a pointless love interest in the form of Freida Pinto that’s used sparingly enough not to detract from the story, and a solid support cast (John Lithgow with Alzheimers!) who’s sole job is to piss off the lead ape/audience as much as possible, but not in a Helena Bonham Carter way. Aside from a post-Hogwarts Tom Felton, hamming it up as an animal worker who likes pissing off apes presumably because he hates himself and is waiting for the day one grabs hold of his face and doesn’t stop until its fingertips meet, the rest of the cast failed to generate much in the way of interest for me. Perhaps a few more comedy moments would have prepared the scumbag audience in my screening for the moment lead ape Cesar first speaks, and in doing so, spared me from a few awkward seconds of tittering from aghast people muttering “monkeys can’t speak!” in place of a pivotal moment.
Not as overly long as it could have been, but also lacking in blunt force-based deaths. If they’d made this an R rating and implemented a scene where a troop of silverback gorillas smash a mime into a wall for 8 minutes, it could have bagged 5/5. As it is, with lovely pacing, benchmark effects, and a clear absence of Helena Bonham Carter, it’s not far off.
Paying cash moneys to see this film was fuelled by the one constant keeping me going throughout the trilogy’s existence, pure and simple curiousity. My mind gets bombarded by a series of random images taken from the film and, unable to piece together what it means or what might precede/follow said images, I stumble into the theatre to have my fears confirmed.
Coupled with the kind of Transformers fanboy syndrome that could only ever lead to disappointment, the task ahead was indeed grim. But to elaborate on this film from a recommendation/deterrent standpoint would be pointless. Most people who find this article will have already seen the film so instead, I’ll try to make sense of what just happened.
The film is stretched out over 3 hours, which should henceforth be referred to as the hour of potential, the hour of convolution and the hour of little Michael Bay sitting in the sandpit smashing trucks together. Most of you won’t remember that first hour, such is the impact of the last act. The first half, in general, does a competent job of making amends for the second movie and, aside from a few human-orientated scenes that make fuck all sense, makes the prospect of a big finale fairly exciting. There are at least 3 solid action sequences, all of them using camera angles that are far away enough to completely understand what’s happening, and brief moments of comedy that don’t rely too heavily on pratfalls or ‘hilarious’ robot stereotypes.
Then comes 45 minutes of plot building. All the plot the public ever wants from a sci-fi blockbuster can, and should be covered in a dramatic introduction. This movie HAS a dramatic introduction but at some point during the storyboard process Bay thought he was onto the most epic plot that has evar been wroted and set about making it the forefront of the movie. But then thankfully changed his mind and popped in a full hour of climax.
A fucking hours worth of climax? I half expected people to start openly weeping half way through the last action set piece, not because of confusion or sensory overload, but at the sheer despair of why someone would do this. The giant tentacle transformer hinted at being the ‘end boss’ in the trailers is dispatched within the first half of this onslaught and instead, the ultimate end fight is two men slapping each on a pile of rubble 10 feet off the ground. It’s like a cruel trick. I wanted, no, NEEDED four things from this movie:
1) It to be a lot better than Revenge of the Fallen.
2) Some proper coherency in the battle scenes.
3) For Optimus Prime to not get his head kicked in or, like in the last movie, flat-out murdered.
4) To see a fucking giant axe.
I was mildly satisfied on three counts and fully aroused on the forth point. Being mildly better than ROTF gets it some plus points and, although he doesn’t get flat out defeated, poor old Optimus does get badly tampered with and also sits out a lot of the final barrage because he’s tangled up in some construction cables presumably made from carbon nanotubes.
The human cast are immediately forgettable and I swear to Christ some of them are put in there just to fuck with me. There are sequences that seem implemented just to create debate, for I can think of no other reason to have John Malkovich pretend to box with Bumblebee other than to log anyone who laughs and have them chemically castrated at a later point. Shia Lebouf does a decent job of being sweaty and panicked once again, and some poor girl with Downs Syndrome has been carted onto set in place of Megan Fox so there’s not even any tit to look at anymore without feeling dirty about it.
There’s nothing left but to focus on the positives really. Remember, we’ll always have the animated movie, this one wasn’t as bad as the second, and for the love of shit, try to block out Starscream’s death altogether. It simply did not happen.
