Caesar Leads The Rise of the Apes

Caesar was born at Gyn-Sys Laboratories in San Francisco, CA. His parents had been captured in Africa and brought to the lab to test genetic therapies, specifically to find a cure for Alzheimer Disease. Read The Tale Of Caesar's Parents

After William Rodman treated Caesar with "The Cure", Caesar began to develop intelligence beyond what any other ape had ever achieved. When some of the techs at Gen-Sys start treating Caesar badly, Rodman takes him home. Together with his father (who is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer), Rodman raises Caesar like a son.

But, no matter how intelligent Caesar is, he is still an animal and it seems he may have an anger control problem...

When Caesar finds a way to escape from Gen-Sys he makes a decision to take the rest of the apes with him. He is not happy with the way that humans treat animals, and he is pissed that they used his brothers and sisters as test subjects.

Before releasing the other apes, Caesar finds "The Cure" and treats the apes with it. Millions of other apes being to gain intelligence and once they are released they form a revolution against the humans under the leadership of Caesar.

Will Rodman be able to stop Caesar or will the apes take control of the world?

The apes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes are a lot different than any of the previous apes movies. In the original movies, the apes are simply human actors wearing costumes.

In The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the movie creators knew they needed something more than ape masks to make the movie special. The original movies take place hundreds of year in the future and the apes have evolved to a more human state. However, "Rise of the Apes" takes place in the present day so the apes needed to look like... apes.

Since one of the big themes behind the movie is cruel treatment of animals the director, Rupert Wyatt knew that they couldn't use real apes to create the film. Luckily, technology has come a long way since The Planet of the Apes came out in 1968 and the use of something called Motion-Capture Technology(also called Performance Capture) has become more common. It's the same technology that was used to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and those blue characters in Avatar.

Caesar in The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a CGI ape but, he is also played by a human actor, Andy Serkis - the same man who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It's almost like the actor wears a CGI ape costume to create his character. As Serkis described to Popular Mechanics,

"The performance-capture cameras track these markers, like coordinates for your joints. You're basically puppeteering an electronic skeleton in real time-you can see the simplified CG ape puppets moving in absolute synchronicity with our performances, and we use the real-time playback to check what we're doing. The markers on our faces are tracked by these head-cams, which have tiny little LED lights all around them, in great detail."

The use of Performance-Capture Technology means that Caesar the ape can show real emotion on his simian face. I think it's an important development because the audience is able to see what Caesar is feeling. The technology also makes the interaction between the apes and the humans more realistic. When Rodman holds Caesar's hand, he's really holding his hand. This is a big difference from previous uses of cgi.

The character of Caesar also existed in the original Planet of the Apes movies. His story is quite a bit different in those movies but he is still the leader of the revolution.

He was originally given the name Milo when he was born, the son of Cornelius and Zira. Caesar traveled back in time with his parents as a baby and was therefore raised in a time before Apes took over the planet. However, when Caesar began to see how other apes were treated by humans he started a revolution which eventually circled back around to the version of Earth we first saw in The Planet of the Apes.

To learn more about the original Planet of the Apes Series I highly recommend the following Wikipedia articles:

Character in the Planet of the Apes Films
Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Escape From The Planet of the Apes
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes