Disappointing at the End

Rating: 7/10 (30 December 2011)

Last night I was watching Strangers on a Train...the old Alfred Hitchcock film. There's a scene in the film where Bruno (the villain) murders the young girl and you watch the murder through the reflection in the girl's eyeglasses that have fallen to the ground. Now I'm not sure how Hitchcock pulled that off (I'm sure I could look it up), but one thing he obviously didn't use was CGI. It was impressive. Today we use computer graphics for everything in movies, and yes it's very impressive, especially on the big screen. But it does take away from the magic of motion picture. Yes, I know, we've all had this conversation before...at least those of us over the age of 35. And computer graphics do have their place in movies. This would be one of those movies. It allows directors to do things they could never have dreamed of doing 20 years ago...like have a massive battle between apes and humans on the Golden Gate Bridge. That's what we want from technology in movies. Computer generated imagery should allow us to expand the scope and abilities of film to create a more realistic canvas for living out our fantasies (because that's really what movies are for. Does this take away from the original Planet of the Apes movies of the '70s? No, of course not. What we hate about CGI is that it sometimes makes our movies seem "plastic." Here, I don't think that's the case.
But beyond that...how was this movie? Yeah it was good. I enjoyed. James Franco does a fantastic job. And I particularly liked the fact that we side-up with the apes on this one. That is something different from most of the Planet of the Apes franchise movies from the '70s. But the biggest problem with this movie was the ending. It was less than satisfying. I got the feeling that the ending could have gone on from where they left it off, but that the producers wanted to leave off in a good spot for the sequel. So we get a short movie with an ending that doesn't quite go as far as we want it to. The movie could well have gone 30 minutes more and established the beginnings of the apes taking over the world (because we all know that's where the sequel is going. I felt cheated at the end. I felt like they shortened the movie for commercial purposes...to make more money...and that's a bit irritating.