Pretty good.

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2017)

Although there was plenty of room for improvement here, there were a lot of things that I thought this movie did well. When I first saw the trailers back in 2011, it looked to me like the apes were the enemy that was trying to take over the world like in an alien invasion movie. However, I was pleasantly surprised upon finally seeing it this past summer to find that this is not at all an action driven movie. The trailers make it out to be an action movie, but in truth there is only one action scene at the climax. However, there is plenty to keep it interesting and exciting throughout the rest of the movie.
The science/medicine/tech corporation that Will worked for felt a little bit standard, much like Oscorp from the Spiderman movies. However, the company was not looking to make any kind of military technology, which is seen in a lot of action movies. Instead, the writers decided to make the serum that makes Caesar smarter a drug that is intended to cure Alzheimers, which I think was a good choice. It made the entire movie feel more real and allowed it to put some more focus on some of the societal issues that come up in it. There is an active search for a cure to Alzheimers, and it is almost a certainty that pharmaceutical companies would test out their cure on animals before humans. Later, when Caesar gives all of the apes the serum, it makes sense that the first thing the apes would think about with their more intelligent minds would be the oppressive circumstances they are in. Even though animal cruelty was not a major theme of the movie, it was at least presented in a way that gave it more attention and made viewers more likely to think about how we treat animals than say the way the Avengers dealt with the Tessaract. The climatic battle also has more weight because the apes are not the aggressors. Rather they are simply trying to escape and live on their own; the fighting only ensues when the police try to stop them. Whether the serum would actually have such an extensive impact on chimps as it does in the movie is unlikely, but choosing to have the drug make the apes smarter rather than more aggressive like some movies might have done was a good choice in my opinion.
I also really liked the way that the movie used their graphics and mo-cap when dealing with the apes. Like most computer graphics today, it did not make the apes look like real apes, but it at least looked clean enough that it wasn't distracting. But I especially liked the way that Caesar and the other apes were written, directed, and acted. Most of the times when intelligent animals are featured in movies, they either talk, or make incredibly annoying gestures and noises to make up for not being able to speak (see Curious George, Sven from Frozen, the chicken in Moana, the horses in Mulan and Tangled and El Dorado). Here, Caesar was able to communicate through sign, which is a much more realistic and eloquent way of making him a human character to the audience. Instead of trying to make Caesar overly cute or overly aggressive, they just made him seem more human. This made the moment when he finally speaks so much more powerful, at least for me.
There were a few things that I disliked about it. Several shots that were used at the beginning and end of scenes felt rather clichéd and overused, especially as the pace of the movie picked up. Steven Jacobs, the head of the company, felt like kind of a caricature and I got a little annoyed by the way he was written. Last and worst was the young zookeeper Dodge Landon, who felt heinously unrealistic. He's a character that the audience is meant to hate, but I hated him even more because he just felt like a copy of a stereotypical punk, especially in the scene when he brings his friends in to see the apes.
On the whole, I liked it and want to see the next two. It's by no means the perfect sci-fi movie, but sci-fi movies should strive to be more like this one. Overall Rating: 7.8/10.