Roll out the cliche wagon!

So every few years, Fox tries to resurrect the Planet of the Apes. Last time, they commissioned Tim Burton to helm a remake of the original movie, figuring that probably Tim Burton would do something special with it. And it wasn't BAD, but it definitely wasn't good either. Now Fox has decided to just skip things ahead and do a remake of the FOURTH Planet of the Apes film, my personal favorite, "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes." This, of course, is the one where the apes actually take over the earth. I guess if they had to do another remake, at least we'll be spared from yet another iteration of the original.

So this one is called "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (I think it was originally "Rise of the Apes," which actually makes more sense as a sentence, but somehow sounds worse). And the trailer is out right now. So go watch it here. I'll wait.



Done?

Now you can see why I called this post "roll out the cliche wagon." Because holy crap in a bucket, did they roll out the cliche wagon. Oh my god, seriously, seriously... this is the plot? Well-meaning scientists trying to cure SOMETHING create a drug that accelerates the apes' brains, and the apes turn evil and go on a rampage. That is the plot of every fucking monster movie since 1932! Really, this is the best idea you had?

That line is even in the trailer. You know the line. "There are some things man was never meant to tamper with," or some paraphrasing thereof. Really, we really had to use that line? And the last big action shot of the trailer is a gorilla jumping toward a helicopter. I swear to god, if I see one more trailer where something or someone jumps toward a helicopter, I will blow my brains out.

You know you're in trouble when the big selling point is the special effects. The trailer proudly advertises that the film is "From WETA, the special effects house that brought you Avatar." No mention of a director or a writer. Do they even mention James Franco? And they are very pretty special effects, I mean it really does look like a bunch of actual apes rampaging through a city. But what good are nice special effects when you don't give a crap about what's happening?

Look, I know "Conquest" is not a great film, probably not even a terribly good one, but it had its plot down. Apes were mistreated by humans, starting as pets but then turning into slaves. They were beaten and oppressed. And then an intelligent ape who could speak (who had come back from the future) incited the other apes toward violence, and they took the world from the humans by force. You could sympathize with the apes, you actually felt bad for them. It was a justified revolution, and there was a very interesting dark inevitability to the ape from the future creating the very world that he'd come from (as if to say, the "upside-down world" Charlton Heston found in the original was always bound to happen, the violence and hatred of man would inevitably lead to this no matter how the past was changed).

This just does away with all of that and goes with the old cliche. At one point a character specifically points out that you can't trust the apes because they aren't human... and I started to feel a little uncomfortable, because now we've shifted to a whole different metaphor. If "Conquest" was an analogy for Apartheid, then "Rise" is the paranoid white fantasy of "Birth of a Nation:" if you give the darkies an education, they'll rise up and kill ya, cause they ain't human like you and me. Is that really where we want to take this? I mean, okay, the apes in "Rise" were obviously being experimented on and kept in cages, and we'll probably see some random ape-beatings to try to drum up some old "Conquest"-style sympathy... but without the full-scale slavery shown in "Conquest," the violent revolution of the apes just comes off as senselessly savage. If they don't have justification, then you end up with a race-relations metaphor that you really, really don't want to be using. And judging from just what they show in the trailer, it seems that's what they're going for.

The original Planet of the Apes films, while hardly perfect, relied heavily on social commentary to tell their stories (it was the seventies, Hollywood directors were still allowed to do that). Tim Burton's remake of the original threw out the discussions of human rights, nuclear weaponry, and religious oppression, resulting in a neutered action story that had nice special effects but not much else. "Rise" seems content to repeat that pattern. Never let it be said that Hollywood learns from its mistakes.

Additional Comments by Master Badger:

I'm not going to watch the trailer yet, because I know It will enrage me. This is the guy who owns this Planet of the Apes set, so you better believe I like the franchise.