We have been bringing you plenty of news lately on plot details and casting announcements for the 20th Century Fox prequel to the 1968 science fiction classic, Planet of the Apes.
In the original film, Charlton Heston played a US astronaut who crash lands on a strange planet populated by intelligent, speaking apes, where the human population has been pressed into slavery.
Rise of the Apes tells the story of the human experiments on apes that leads to their evolution and eventual dominance of the planet and Just Jared have grabbed an on-set shot showing James Franco, Freida Pinto and the incomparable Andy Serkis. Just Jared have since removed the photo, but we picked up a copy at Bleeding Cool and have reproduced it below for your viewing pleasure.
As we announced here and here, Franco will play one of the key scientists involved in the experiments on apes, driven by his desire to find a cure for the Alzheimers afflicting his father (played by John Lithgow) and Pinto leads alongside Franco as a primatologist.
Serkis, for the umpteenth time in his career, is wrapped up in a performance-capture suit, playing Caesar, who will go on to become the leader of the ape uprising. Although Rick Baker’s ape make up work on Tim Burton’s re-imagining of Planet of the Apes back in 2001 was astonishing, it has clearly been felt that performance-capture and CGI are the way to go for this film and so Serkis must once again (as with Lord of the Rings, King Kong and the upcoming Tin Tin) suffer a silly-looking leotard and lots of dots on his face throughout principal photography. We’ll get to see the fruit of his (and everyone else’s) labours on 24th June 2011.
