Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes
2011 · Rupert Wyatt · Rise of the Planet of the Apes on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Caesar looking out of windows and cages. (staging)
The attic glass, the bars, the sanctuary fence. Wyatt keeps building a frame inside the frame with Caesar behind it, studying a leashed dog or a street he cannot walk down. He is comparing.
Payoff: Self-awareness is staged as looking. He measures his own captivity against somebody else's freedom. In the reading: perception-image. The reading calls this the perception-image made the engine: the story advances by what he sees, not by what he does.
Watch Caesar's face in close-up when nobody speaks. (performance)
Andrew Lesnie shoots the eyes the way another film would shoot an explosion. Confusion hardens into recognition, recognition cools into resentment. Serkis builds a whole interior out of gaze and posture.
Payoff: The close-ups are carrying the plot. Every piece of story you need is in a face that says nothing. In the reading: icon of power. The reading calls this an icon of power: small movements on a face accumulating toward a threshold that has not been crossed yet.
Listen for how much the apes say without words. (sound)
Grunts, screams, breathing, the clang of bars against concrete in the facility. Patrick Doyle scores the suburban scenes tenderly and the later ones with percussion. Caesar answers with gesture, not speech.
Payoff: The sound of a body is doing the acting. Listen to what the facility's acoustics say about the place.
Watch the light change from the house to the facility. (light)
Warm, ordinary domestic light in the San Francisco home. Hard, institutional light in the primate sanctuary. Green and fog in the redwoods. Lesnie moves the palette with Caesar's circumstances.
Payoff: You can read his situation off the light before the scene tells you anything about it.
Count how long the film waits before any spectacle. (structure)
Two acts of domestic life, science and confinement, cut patiently by Conrad Buff and Mark Goldblatt. Wyatt insisted that your investment in Caesar come first. The action only starts once it has been charged.
Payoff: A blockbuster that spends its first hour on a character who cannot act. That patience is the whole design.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Caesar looks at through glass and bars. The drama here is in seeing, long before acting.