Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes Storyboards Reveal Alternate Opening
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of last summer’s biggest surprises. It looked like just another ill-advised attempt to combine two of modern cinema’s most pernicious trends: the prequel and the reboot. Plus, many of us still had yet to shake the bitter taste of Tim Burton’s Apes miscarriage. Against all odds, however, it proved to be a surprisingly smart and enjoyable look at the very earliest origins of those “damn dirty apes” that bedeviled Charlton Heston way back in 1968. Now Warren Drummond, one of the artists who worked on Rise, has shared a set of storyboards that lay out a different version of the film’s opening sequence. He shared the storyboards with Filmsketchr, who edited them together into a snazzy YouTube video. You can check it out below, or click over to Filmsketchr to examine them individually.
The sequence is fairly similar to the opening as actually filmed, which saw a chimp named “Bright Eyes” running amok through a research lab, then shot dead and revealed to be carrying a baby — the ape that would come to be known as “Caesar” (played brilliantly by Andy Serkis). In Drummond’s version, Bright Eyes instead helps a different ape escape, and he is the one who is shot.
