Andy Serkis Does It Again

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (1:45, PG-13) — SF, 2nd string, sequel
Before ever walking in the front door of the theater, you know from the title alone how this movie is going to end, so it's not as if there's much suspense. About the only mystery is "What happened to the humans?", and you can figure out by about halfway thru the pic which of the 2 likeliest hypotheses is the one to put your money on.
It's a straight-line plot with not a lot of dialog, imaginative or otherwise, so it's all about the execution, which is pretty good.
James Franco gets top billing, but this is Andy Serkis's picture —he's the eponymous character, gets most of the screen time, and delivers the most moving and nuanced performance — for all the good it's going to do him come Oscar time. The Academy will undoubtedly screw him again the way they did after he lit up the screen as Gollum/Smeagol. Franco plays Will Rodman, the earnest researcher whose sympathies for the unfortunate (including his increasingly senile dad) overwhelm his professional ethics regarding the ALZ-112 brain juice he's working on, and Serkis is Caesar, the world's 2nd chimp to attain human-level intelligence. (The 1st, his mother Bright Eyes, meets an early untimely end defending her newborn chimplet.)
After watching the humans treating the chimps like, well, animals, it's hard to avoid rooting for our extremely distant furry cousins, but there are plenty of cautionary cues on both sides of the burgeoning conflict that go unnoticed or minimized until it's too late.
Poor Tom Felton gets another thankless role here, but fan fave Tyler Labine does just fine with his minimal stint as the chief chimp handler. Freida Pinto and John Lithgow give perfectly good performances in all-too-brief appearances. But, as I said, it's Andy Serkis's movie, and he's excellent.