How the monkeys control the zoo

Rating: 8/10 (15 May 2014)

Rebooting movie franchises are one thing. Rebooting a movie franchise that is still comparatively new is another. Rise of the Planet of the Apes cunningly ignores Tim Burton's misfire of a remake and decides to become a sort of remake/prequel to Charlton Hestern's original classic sci-fi movie.
If you don't know or don't care where (chronologically) this movie comes in the series and look at it as a stand-alone work (although, it was a commercial success - not prizes for guessing they'll make a sequel or five), it's actually quite good.
The opening twenty minutes or so are a little slow and I was wondering what I was getting myself into here. However, once the central ape, aka Caesar the mentally genetically-enhanced chimpanzee starts growing up and showing signs of things to come, the story picks off. In fact, it kind of makes the human characters redundant as Caesar steals every scene with the help of a menacing look of bitter resentment towards his cruel human masters. Soon he leads the others apes to revolt against them and, if you can get over the fact that apes can take on gun-totting humans, you'll enjoy the action scene on the Golden Gate bridge (which I'm presuming has been recently rebuilt after Magneto destroyed it in X-men 3).
All in all it's not overly long and, if you like sci-fi and the premise of super-apes potentially taking over the world, give it a shot (of course we hope this film won't give any terrorist factions ideas - we don't want them bringing the world to its knees by releasing a couple of hundred angry monkeys into any major city and watching humanity crumble).
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