When the legacy of a film that you a feel deep affection for is messed with the knee-jerk reaction can be negative; every once in a while a remake can be respected (Dawn of the Dead) or a sequel can outdo the original (The Road Warrior, Aliens) but most sequels and remakes are strictly quick buck affairs. So there’s no point in getting snotty about Rise of the Planet of the Apes; it’s a big, fun, flawed but intelligent reimagining of the series. It’s the best Apes flick since the original film, Planet of the Apes in 1968, one of my all-time favorite movies. The legacy has already been contaminated; the quality of the four sequels (Beneath…, Escape from…, Conquest of…, and Battle for…) vary in quality. Both the live action and animated television series, based on the film, are amazingly boring. And Tim Burton’s ill-conceived remake was a dud. Frankly, fans of Pierre Boulle’s original book have the most to complain about as the ‘68 version’s screenwriters, Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, hit the bull’s-eye, but completely abandoned much of the novel’s concept. The rebooting of a stale series has done wonders in recent years for both Batman and James Bond; rebooting as opposed to remaking looks to be the new way to find new creative angles.
 
The first act of Rise is almost a boy-and-his-dog story, or a scientist-and-his-genetically-intelligent-chimp story. Will Rodman (James Franco), a brilliant geneticist, inspired by his Alzheimer-stricken father, Charles (John Lithgow), works to find a cure while working for one of those evil medical companies. When things go wrong, the apes are slaughtered, but Will brings home one of the ape’s newborn babies, whom he names Caesar (the first of many name references to the original films). He and his dad and then his zoologist girlfriend, Caroline (Freida Pinto), are happily raising their extremely intelligent young ape in picturesque San Francisco and other then the scientific mumbo-jumbo mixed in this could be an above average family flick. But then things go wrong; as Caesar grows into maturity he starts to wonder who he is, and after protecting Charles from a brute neighbor, he is sent off to a sort of stray ape kennel (doesn’t every city have one?). It’s an old, rusty animal shelter and here the flick really lights up and becomes a classic prison tale.
 
The sleazy and abusive monkey jail is run by Landon (a wasted Brian Cox) and his overacting creep son Dodge (of course in the original flick Dodge and Landon were the names of Charlton Heston’s astronaut cohorts). Here Caesar must survive the abuse of his new captors as well as his fellow apes who he has never been exposed to; his anguish in his new environment is truly heartbreaking. He ends up befriending an angry Gorilla and, like Caesar, a sign language-talking orangutan (named Maurice, after Maurice Evans who played the orangutan Dr Zaius in the original), while trying to adapt to his new life. Eventually he becomes the leader of the apes, teaching them collaboration, while planning their escape. In a rather far-fetched plot twist he escapes, goes home, and grabs some of that smart medicine and gasses his ape pals so they can be on closer intellectual ground. This leads to their breakout where they team up with zoo apes and rescued lab apes; they wreak havoc on the streets of San Fran and have a showdown with the cops over the Golden Gate Bridge, before retreating to the safety of California’s redwood trees in Muir Woods.
 
That first act of the movie has definite allusions to the original Apes: a sympathetic scientific couple trying to protect an intelligent creature in a world that considers him a beast. But interestingly once the movie hits the ape jail it jumps up three flicks to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, where the talking ape Caesar leads his fellow suppressed apes in a revolution against man (I mean, if you consider taking over a Century City mall revolutionary).
 
Besides the name references, there are repeated lines from the old series, “It’s a mad house,” “damn dirty apes,” and “no!”

While Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi were putting Australian cinema on the map in the 1970s with films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Devil’s Playground, an amazing underworld of exploitation cinema was also happening Down Under full of sex and violence, exuberantly captured by director Mark Hartley in his slam bang documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Like his more recent ode to Filipino exploitation flicks, Machete Maidens Unleashed, Hartley has found the perfect formula for honoring the less honorable world cinema. Tracing Australia’s growth from sexploitation through stuntploitation and finally peaking with George Miller’s masterful Mad Max and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior). With a plethora of wall-to-wall clips and both informative and entertaining talking heads telling the story including Quentin Tarantino, George Lazenby, Brian Trenchard-Smith, John Waters, and Richard Franklin, this movie is an absolute blast.

Is it possible to love a movie and recommend it but still advise to turn it off just after the half-way mark? The history of films with great Act Ones and maybe even Act Twos that then fall apart by Act Three constitutes a long list (Mulholland Dr., From Dusk Till Dawn, Full Metal Jacket, etc.). I Am Legend may be the most extreme case. It has a pretty spectacular first half that’s suspenseful, exciting, but by that last act things go terribly astray. Based on the classic novelette by the great writer Richard Matheson, it had been filmed twice earlier— first in the ‘60s as a dull low-budget Vincent Price flick called The Last Man on Earth and then the culty Charlton Heston early ‘70s vehicle re-titled The Omega Man. I don’t remember ever making it all the way through the Price version, but the beloved Heston flick had the same problem as the newest take; though the whole of the ‘70s film is so goofy that the plot twist in the second half is less abrupt and problematic than in the newer more “realistic” version, they both have great set-ups that couldn’t carry through to the end.

George Miller’s Australian gem, The Road Warrior, is hailed by most as one of the greatest action films of all time, especially since it’s a pre-CGI, stunt and stunt driver, driven thrill ride. Its vision of the post apocalyptic future has been ripped off as much as any film, usually badly (1990: The Bronx Warriors, Resident Evil, Doomsday, etc). It has echoes of Kurosawa’s early samurai films as well as John Ford’s cowboys or cavalry dramas. Here, the fort holds oil production so precious for driving around in your jacked-up automobiles; instead of Indians the attackers are mohawked punked-out brutes. This fairly low budget flick looks and feels like a big Hollywood spectacle (coming at the end of Australia’s golden age of stuntploitation films. See the wonderful documentary Not Quite Hollywood for more on this fascinating era).