Stereotypical, yet Good

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2011)

I'll begin by saying the only Planet of the Apes movie I've seen prior to this was the Tim Burton Reboot of 2001. While that movie focused on its own style and a minimalist viewing window of its characters , Rise on the other hand strives to create a more personal story presented in a realistic manner for its audience to soak in and in doing so creating a much more meaningful film. Despite this being a good movie I will say ahead of time it seems the studio aims to market off Rise as something its not. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a character film first and foremost not a summer action flick as its trailers dressed it up as.
Set in present day San Francisco the movie premise circulates around two chief characters, Caesar the Ape (Serkis) and Will (Franco) the scientist . Will, passionately searching for a cure to his father's Alzheimer's and is doing everything he can to stop the degenerative disease forever. Leading a team of scientists he is conducting experiments with an antidote on apes. Caesar is his star pupil for the project. Not to diverge any further into story but I will shoe in that if you can read the title then you already know the direction this movie plans on going
On a technical level this movie is fairly well done. The characters are all fairly stereotypical ( scientist who dangerously pushes the boundaries of science, animal lover to act as a counter point to the progression of science, person who abuses animals solely for the purpose of amusements , etc the list goes on). However all these underdeveloped ,cardboard characters are merely a small distraction from the true hero of this film, the ape Caesar. While not saying more then a few words throughout the film he easily captures the emotion of being beaten down and held as a prisoner. Andy Serkis who also played Gollum and King Kong before this nails every small gesture he does to portray what's going on in Caesars head. To give more credit where it is due I believe Weta did a great job with their top notch CGI and really brought all the Apes performances to very sympathetic levels. Meanwhile Franco's character is driven by the obsession of curing his father and stopping the inevitable at points it really makes what he's doing seem necessary.
Unfortunately the same can't be said for many of the human characters who were lazily created to pawn the audiences hatred towards them and not all of humanity. Yes I'm referring to you Brian Cox and Tom Felton who play the role of bad for the sake of bad and spew out some of the worst dialogue this film has to offer.
Overall the film was good . I would recommend it to anyone not looking for the usual summer of action Hollywood has grown more then accustomed to. This movie breathes life into CGI characters in ways I've never seen before. By the end of it I was really cheering for Caesar's success and I knew everyone else in the theatre was.
7/10