A space station called Athena-1, owned by a gene-manipulation company called Energyne, is destroyed by a lab-rat that mutates out of control. The sole surviving crewmember Kerry Atkins (Marley Shelton) flees in the escape pod as the station implodes. With her are several pathogen canisters that company CEO Claire Wyden (Malin Ackerman) demands she bring along. But the pod disintegrates on re-entry, killing the astronaut and leaving a trail of debris across the U.S. One canister is swallowed by a crocodile in the Everglades and another contaminates a wolf in Wyoming.
Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson), ex-special forces soldier working at the San Diego Wildlife Service as a primatologist, has become friends with a rare albino gorilla named George. They communicate with sign language. One of the canisters lands in the habitat and George is exposed. George begins to grow in size and becomes aggressive. Genetic engineer Doctor Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) contacts Davis. She had hoped to advance research on CRISPER (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) as a disease cure, but Energyne had planned to use it—you guessed it—as a biological weapon. Kate was falsely accused of a crime and incarcerated while her terminally ill brother died.
George escapes from his compound and goes on a rampage. He calms down eventually but is captured by Agent Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and put on a Boeing C-17. CEO Claire and her jerk of a brother Brett (Jake Lacy) engage a mercenary team to capture the mutant wolf Ralph, and the entire team is killed. Claire plans to use George as a cover-up and programs a huge transmitter atop the Chicago Willis Tower (their headquarters) to lure the animals, who are engineered to respond to certain frequencies. Davis and Kate are helped by Russell to steal a helicopter, and they follow.
George and Ralph are rampaging through the city and the military is outmatched. Then the crocodile, Lizzie, shows up. Davis and Kate plan to steal an antidote from Energyne. They break into the tower and take several vials of it but are caught by the Wyden siblings. Claire tells Davis that the antidote only eliminates the aggressiveness, not the unnatural growth. Then she shoots him, but he survives.
When George climbs to the top of the tower, as giant apes tend to do, Claire orders Davis to distract it while she tries to escape, holding Kate at gunpoint. Kate slips a vial into Claire’s handbag and pushes her toward George, who devours Claire and the vial and returns to his normal personality. Russell, down below, takes incriminating evidence from Brett, who is crushed by debris. As the tower collapses, Davis and Kate crash-land a helicopter on the Federal Plaza.
Davis and George defeat the other animals while Kate and Russell rush to stop the military from deploying a MOAB (Massive Ordinance Air Blast) against them. George battles Ralph and Davis tricks the wolf into approaching the crocodile Lizzie, who decapitates him. Davis uses grenades against the crocodile, but Lizzie survives and overpowers George, who is impaled by rebar. Davis distracts Lizzie with a helicopter but is nearly killed and George uses the rebar to kill Lizzie. The airstrike is aborted. Afterward, George and Davis, Kate and Russell, rescue civilians.
The film was directed by Brad Peyton, based on the video game Rampage by Midway Games, the script written by Ryan Engle, Jake Lacy, Joe Manganiello, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Peyton and Johnson had previously teamed up on Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas. It received mixed reviews. George was animated through the motion-capture of Jason Lilesa, and visual effects were mostly by Weta Digital. Weta had a lot of experience with apes after doing King Kong and the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy. Three new games were based on the movie. The reviews said it was kind of dumb but really good at what it—and the Rock—does. It was nominated for Teen Choice Awards. I liked the big gorilla. Both of them. Their relationship is the best thing in the movie. Dwayne Johnson is basically the thinking man’s Arnold Schwarzenegger.
When Davis signs his name to George the Gorilla, he signs the word Rock. In the video game, the creatures are mutated humans, here they are animals. There really was an albino gorilla once, named Snow White or Snowflake, born in Spanish Guinea in 1964 and living in the Barcelona Zoo. He fathered 22 gorillas, none of which were albino. Ralph is a seriously mutated wolf. He has bat ears, porcupine quills, and flying squirrel membranes. Lizzie is a crocodile with boar tusks, fish gills, gecko toes, a pangolin-like armor, and a spiked tail like a Stegosaurus. All three have the growth-rate of a Great White Shark, the strength of a Rhinoceros Beetle, the speed of a Cheetah, and the tissue-regeneration of the African Spiny Mouse.