They name the baby "Caesar", which isn't just a reference to one of the saga's central character, but also a name befitting the leader he will become (as opposed to "Cornelius" or some other reference they could have made). Just as Bright Eyes wanted to save her baby, Will wants to save his father, and in the process Will and Charles end up making the young chimp a member of their family. After Will reluctantly takes the baby chimp home, we discover that his father Charles ( John Lithgow) suffers from Alzheimer's, and that's what pushes Will to try and discover a cure. The protection of family is one of the central themes in Rise. All of the apes are put down, but then Will and the lab's chimp handler Robert Franklin ( Tyler Labine) discover that Bright Eyes had a baby, and she went crazy because she believed her child was about to be taken away.
Will's callow boss Steven Jacobs ( David Oyelowo) believes the ALZ-112 made the apes go mad, and orders them to be exterminated. However, in the middle of giving his presentation to Gen-Sys' board of directions, Bright Eyes seemingly goes nuts, rampages through the facility, and has to be shot dead by security. Will Rodham ( James Franco) is on the verge of a breakthrough, and believes the experiments on Bright Eyes work. We then move to Gen-Sys and experiments on "Bright Eyes", which isn't just a reference to the original movie, but also becomes a plot point to signal that an ape given the ALZ-112 or ALZ-113 formula to repair brain damage or increase intelligence, respectively, has a side effect of adding a green glow to the ape's eyes.ĭr. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is filled with major and minor nods to the original, and in the first scene we see humans as the ones with the nets as they round up apes in an unknown jungle. While it didn't carry the heavy commentary of the original saga, Rise took a new path by putting a strong focus on family and bringing a level of spectacle far beyond what any Apes film had done before. So it's fitting that the series' reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, would restart the clock to unload the baggage of the previous movies rather than throwing us back into the middle of the madhouse. From there, Beneath carried the torch to extinction, Escape traveled back in time, Conquest took a twenty-year jump to begin the downfall of humans, and Battle has a prologue and epilogue that take place in 2670 AD.
The original movie opens with Taylor ( Charlton Heston) explaining that his spaceship's mission isn't to explore the galaxy, but to use Einstein's Law of Relativity to leave Earth and return in the distant future where it might not be such a shithole (Taylor was disappointed). The Planet of the Apes movies have always been interested with time.