The hostile takeover will begin later this summer.
Monkeys are all over the place in the new trailer (embedded below) for 20
Century Fox’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a prequel to the long-running Planet of the Apes franchise.
In Rise, Will Rodman (James Franco) is working on a cure for Alzheimer’s and testing it on apes. One of his test subjects – an ape named Caesar (Andy Serkis) – then becomes super intelligent and leads the charge in a monkey revolt. The cast also includes Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, and Tyler Labine.
As for the trailer itself, the first half introduces James Franco’s character and experiments, while the latter half shows Caesar and his monkey pals after they’ve been let loose on the world. The apes are created with CGI instead of makeup, and the effects are being done by Weta Digital, the team responsible for Avatar. So far, the effects are looking great – you can even see the emotion in Caesar’s face when he gets his close-up – although motion capture veteran Andy Serkis (Gollum from Lord of the Rings) definitely gets a lot of the credit. He also did motion capture work for the 2005 remake of King Kong, so he already knows how to act like a monkey.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on August 5.
