Is it a good sign when the trailer bills WETA and its special effects over the cast or the story itself?
I don’t think so.
After a few teases, Fox debuted The Rise of the Planet of the Apes teaser in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a short trailer, but it packs a lot of the story in, which is what makes its WETA namedrop a little troubling. You’re putting it all out there, but with a caveat. Hey, just concentrate on the apes, all right? Don’t look at James Franco over there.
And you probably don’t want to look at Franco. The guy is experiencing a lot of backlash right now — some deserved, most ridiculous — but I can’t say this showcases his best work. Perhaps I’ve just seen too much of his off-kilter humor this year, but his earnestness seems like it walked out of an SNL skit. Freida Pinto is just there to look pretty and sort of scientific and humane, and she does.
I’ll give the trailer this much — it’s creepy. There are some truly chilling little setpieces (Caesar’s lockpick, him watching the happy couple’s slumber) but it’s undermined by some real goofiness. Gorilla-attacks-helicopter should be a meme any minute now…
The trailer is up at Apple, no embed, so watch it and come back to chat.
18 comments
Meh. I the prosthetics in the early films were a million times better. These apes looks too much like chimps. No imagination AT ALL by weta. “Chimp downs chopper” is about to become the new “nuke the fridge”. Major MAJOR FAIL.
This movie has everything! I love legitimate cinema….
legit cinema…oh god. This looks horrible. One the ape jumping that large expanse towards the helicopter is pure bullshit, apes do not have the body frame and hips to make such a jump. How do a few lab monkeys grow in numbers to take over a town or even the world? I am afraid this is going to be as bad as Burtons version. Here is my idea!
How cool of a twist would it of been if it were some kind of cancer cure/antibody they got the populace to get injected with and it slowly devolved mankind each generation into an ape with all the properties of a man. Not only do you breathe fresh air into a told story, you get the religious people freaking about evolution.
That’s a really great idea. Kudos.
the only thing chilling about this trailer is how bad the acting is.
so where is Mark Wahlberg?
I thought it looked pretty good.
…although it’s a movie about a drug that helps the brain repair itself with the side effect of making the animals it’s tested on smarter and more deadly, so maybe it should be called Rise Of The Deep Blue Sea Monkeys.
I kept expecting Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt to show up.
Franco looks good – what’s with all the hate/disdain for everything by the site’s staff lately? You guys are awfully jaded – but I’m not getting a vibe that this is a very interesting story that needed to be told (or rather, RE-told). I’m increasingly convinced that the original Planet of the Apes franchise was a product of its time that simply can’t be replicated. It was too much in line with the attitude of its era, and there’s nothing more to say about it today. Nothing WORTH saying.
Ya. Looks like this one’s more about the sci-fi and less about the social commentary, but I suppose we shouldn’t judge a movie by its trailer. It’s cut together more to get asses in seats than to highlight the potentially smarter aspects of the film.
Right, cuz sci-fi ( a synonym for sp fx) can’t have social commentary.
They ARE chim
Er… not saying it has to be one or the other, just that what I saw seems to be playing up the flashiness & effects and downplaying the social commentary. I mean, sci-fi usually has some of the best social commentary out there. Besides, it’s (obviously) just the trailer I’m talking about, which isn’t always indicative of the final product. But if you feel the need to be unnecessarily snarky, I can’t stop you.
I’ve got to agree with Bishop here, there was nothing objectionable in that trailer. If I hadn’t read Elisabeth’s commentary first, I wouldn’t have thought anyone would have disliked it. Doesn’t look like the greatest movie ever, but considering I’m not even that big of a fan of the originals, it still looks like a solid execution of a well-tred idea. That last shot was pretty chilling.
This looks great. A thousand times more excited than I was a week ago.
That last shot of the chimp thinking was pretty chilly.
How many friggin’ apes did they screw with? I would imagine that based on numbers, we still outnumbered them at that point, so what was the problem? Did the chimp launch nukes or something? I never saw the originals, so I don’t know the story here.
I actually liked the trailer and think the movie looks pretty good. I’m a Franco fan. Burtons’ ape movie sucked, but at least he stuck with the costumes and prosthetics everyone seems to miss from the original films. All complaints about a summer sci fi movie doing exactly what summer sci fi movies are supposed to do aside, I agree with the numbers issue. That ape control group must be insane! And one thing I think everyone needs to embrace here. Suspension of disbelief. We all know monkeys can’t do a lot of stuff but let’s not crucify fx for doing exactly what they were developed to do. Lastly, Ceasar looks creepy as fuck and that’s a good thing.
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