Comparison: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Cowboys & Aliens” (Part 1)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a hit. Cowboys & Aliens is not.
Apes:
Production budget: $93M
B.O. (1 week): $77.4M ($54M domestic / $23.4M international)
C&A:
Production budget: $163M
B.O. (2 weeks): $67.4M (domestic)
Apes will likely recoup its production budget and P&A costs within 4 weeks of its release.
C&A will need a big performance internationally just to break even.
Compare critical reaction to the two movies. Per Rotten Tomatoes:
Apes:
Critics: 81%
Audience: 89%
C&A:
Critics: 44%
Audience: 59%
Why the “Yea!” for Apes and the “Meh!” for C&A? I have been puzzling over this since seeing both movies. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood seems to be that the latter underperformed because of the Western element, the belief being that young adult and teen males are put off by that genre.
To which I respond with two words: True Grit. That 2010 movie grossed over $250M worldwide. You don’t get those kind of numbers unless you grab young males, too.
Conversely the conventional wisdom re the success of Apes seems to be two-fold: It’s a science fiction movie and it’s a pre-awareness title. But that seems an oversimplification as well. Yes, it’s a sci-fi story, but only in its conceit — monkeys becoming super smart via drug testing. The story itself is very much a drama wrapped in the action genre. And in terms of its relationship to the original 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, that’s a bit complicated, too. First this iteration is a prequel, not a remake. Second there already was a remake (2001), a poor one at that to muddy the waters.
Confounding the discussion even more is a huge discrepancy between the two movies in terms of their respective endings. C&A has what one might call a ‘traditional’ Hollywood resolution whereby the Good Guys (humans) defeat the Bad Guys (aliens), whereas Apes inverts the paradigm: The Bad Guys (monkeys) defeat the Good Guys (humans).
But are the monkeys really the Bad Guys? And that is, I think, the entry point into understanding at least one of the reasons why Apes has connected with an audience and C&A has struggled: the emotional resonance of each movie.
[SPOILER ALERT!]
With Rise of the Planet of the Apes, we have a story told from the perspective of Dual Protagonists: a human Will Rodman (James Franco) and a genetically altered monkey Caesar (Andy Serkis). Each character has a distinctive psychological journey.
Will is a scientist researching a drug to cure Alzheimer’s disease. This is a personal crusade for him, a point made again and again by the presence of his father Charles, whose once brilliant mind has been cut down by the very condition Will is trying to cure. There are two other dynamics in Will’s metamorphosis: (1) At first, he doesn’t have a personal connection to monkeys, seeing them as a means to an end (research testing), but once he ‘adopts’ Caesar, he makes a definite emotional connection to this particular monkey and by extension (more or less) to the rest of the species. (2) Initially Will is a fierce advocate for pushing the envelope in terms of research on the experimental drug ALZ 112, even to the point of testing it out on his father, a desperation move that bears fruit at first, then fails, eventually leading to dire results. This causes Will to switch positions with his boss Jacob, telling him he has to stop testing a new version of the drug (ALZ 113). But it is this sense of loss tied to his father’s deteriorating condition, then eventual death that provides the most powerful emotional point of connection for the moviegoer to this Protagonist character.
As effective as Will’s storyline is, Caesar’s proves to be an even more dramatic and absorbing psychological journey. It echoes classic aspects of the Protagonist metamorphosis arc:
* Innocence to Experience: Casear starts the story literally as a babe in arms, representing pure innocence, but through an extraordinary set of circumstances — bonding with Will, perceived wrongly as an inhuman threat (when he defends Charles against a surly neighbor), yanked out of the only home he’s known, thrust into a hostile environment amidst imprisoned but wild apes, tortured by insensitive humans, feeling betrayed by Will — he eventually sees the world in a new and more experienced light.
* Reactive to Proactive: Given this new ‘realistic’ world view, Caesar moves from a reactive approach, which is largely in place for the first half of the movie, to a proactive one in which his only fitting course of action is to lead an ape rebellion against their human oppressors, to gain freedom from confinement for himself and Freedom in a more macro sense for his species.
* Disunity to Unity: On an existential level, answering the question “who am I,” Caesar begins in a state of Disunity — a genetically modified ape, part monkey (physical), part human (mental), a wild animal living in a domestic environment, an orphan — and ends up creating and claiming a state of Unity, embracing both his ape aspect and his genius human aspect, thus becoming the leader of the rebellion.
It is Caesar’s psychological journey that serves as the core of the emotional narrative. It works well on both a visceral level as we experience Caesar’s pain of loss, alienation, and oppression, and an intellectual one as we follow his step-by-step evolution toward a new world view. In this regard, let me make two observations I think go a long way toward explaining why Apes creates an emotional resonance with an audience:
(1) Caesar’s metamorphosis is a fascinating one: Clearly the filmmakers, starting with screenwriters and Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver (who also served as producers on the project), were wholeheartedly committed to exploring this character’s psychological transformation because it not only comprises most of the Plotline’s scenes, it is also the moral and aesthetic center of the story. In this day and age where films hit us over the head with action seemingly every five minutes, it is frankly shocking how much time, effort and care Apes takes in depicting the incremental process of Caesar’s metamorphosis. But it is the character’s unique set of life-circumstances and that fundamental universal question — Who am I — that provides more than enough grist for the mill to justify this choice and [apparently] satisfy moviegoers in terms of their emotional connection to the ape who would be king.
(2) Proximity of loss: We see Caesar’s mother get killed. We see how much Caesar enjoys life as a youth. We see how much he revels being out in the wild (redwood forest). Then we see how all that gets taken away when he is imprisoned. His sense of loss is right there in front of us and we experience it with Caesar in his real-time.
Combine Caesar’s psychological journey with that of Will, and Apes provides moviegoers with a pair of compelling Protagonists, so that all the drama and all the action actually means something because we are emotionally connected to the characters.
In Part Two, we analyze Cowboys & Aliens, focusing on the dynamic of emotional resonance to see if we can understand, at least in part, why that movie has not connected with audiences the way Rise of the Planet of the Apes has.