Rise of The Planet of The Apes: Featurette claims the film wouldn’t be possible without Andy Serkis.

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Andy Serkis wonders why the Chimp has a better costume than him?

I’ve seen some pretty impressive footage from this film over the past couple of months, but this is close to the best of all. With those often used, but usually effective shots where you go from the actors in their mo-cap suits, to the early CGI models to the finished scene, it really showcases the amazing work that has been done here in a relatively short space of time. IT also highlights one of the advance in tech that the effects house WETA (of Lord of The Rings, King Kong & Avatar fame) have been keen to talk about; The ability to take the mo-cap equipment out into the real world and away from the studios & sets.

The best part if this featurette is getting o see Andy at work. He truly is a master at this; he infused Kong with a lot of character and pathos and his work on Gollum was criminally overlooked, for The Two Towers especially, by the academy. Sure that performance, unlike this one was enhanced visually by the animators, but there was more than enough there to justify at least a nomination (Stunt work and face replacement hasn’t stopped other stars from winning Oscars in the past (Natalie Portman for example, deservedly, won an Oscar despite her performance being physically enhanced in Black Swan.)

Here however you can clearly see that every movement of the face, of the eyes (and it is the eyes that are selling this film for me) come from Andy Serkis and only the translation of his human face to a chimp face is noticeable, not extra “acting”. T’s easy to see why early reviews are raving about Serkis’ performance.

On another note, anyone that says the effects are great but not quite real enough to fool the eye, as if that somehow lessens the impact of the film, needs to explain  how they   were ever ‘fooled’ into thinking the apes in the other six films weren’t being played by people i  make up. If they weren’t fooled, how did they ever enjoy any of them?