Ape-tastic. You'll go bananas over this one! No monkeying around. (And, I'm not sorry about the puns.)

Rating: 9/10 (6 August 2011)

Thanks to French novelist Pierre Boulle and his narrative entitled La Planète des singes (to us English speakers known as Planet of the Apes), those at Hollywood have such a wonderful idea to work with. Just the thought of apes taking over our planet is intriguing in itself.
An entire decade has gone by since we've seen these apes takeover the world. Tim Burton's 2001 rendition of Planet of the Apes was outright pitiful. It was just a very messy movie with too little of an "awe" appeal and cheesy monkey suits; excuse me, ape suits.
I had low expectation for this prequel or reboot or what-ever you want to call it. After seeing a few videos and reading a bit about it, I decided to spent my money on it; and, well I'm glad I did.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and technology was a great mix. No monkey suits. No horrible make-up. No disgraceful special effects. If I had a time machine and was to show this movie in 2001, people would swear the apes on screen were real. On top of that, this film encapsulated the motion-capture technology that we saw in Avatar with the brilliant performance of Andy Serkis. And, that's only the beginning to this list of amazements to this surprisingly good summer flick.
This new genesis brings us a new director, Rupert Wyatt, and new screen writers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. I'm unfamiliar with any of those names, but will tell you that Jaffa and Silver worked on a 1997 project together entitled The Relic and it has scored a 5.4 rating on IMDb, so obviously they did something different about 14 years later. Prior to Rise of the Apes, the last film Wyatt directed was The Escapist; I'll have to add that to my ever-growing IMDb Watchlist.
As mentioned before, Andy Serkis had a truly amazing performance. His other hit role was his portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings series. Serkis plays the leader of the Apes as Caesar, a genetically modified chimpanzee, and we see a true character built up with emotions and intelligence.
The film starts out in a kind-of-futuristic-looking drug lab with the likes of the main human character Will Rodman, portrayed quite well by James Franco. I've always been a fan of Franco and this performance just beefs up his stature in my mind.
Will has been working on a cure for Alzheimer's Disease and just may have found that cure. Having been tested on Bright Eyes, a female chimp, ALZ-112 is the genetically engineered retrovirus that may be it. Much to his dismay, the presentation to gain the approval of the cure that he is about to give to the company investors and board goes terribly wrong.
Caesar is the child of Bright Eyes, and Will decides to take him home on a temporary basis. This temporary state however turns into five years and the movie progresses. During that time Will is able to help cure his father Charles Rodman (kind of cure), played by John Lithgow (that dude from 3rd Rock from the Sun and a season of Dexter). I enjoyed his performance as well.
I've read in places that this movie seems to have plot-holes. Perhaps the leap forward in time is a plot-hole? Or, it could be that the new strain of ALZ-113 wasn't really explained? We obviously know that the new ALZ-113 was more aggressive, since it kills a human character and increases the aggression of a chimp character, so that's how I justify that. Also, in prior stories of the Planet of Apes franchise we know of distinct groups of apes; I believe they were separated by aggression. That might explain it. Just a thought. I don't think the skipping forward is a plot-hole though.
Well, as human-like as Caesar may act and seem in most of the first half of this movie, he eventually becomes overwhelmed and has to be put into a local primate shelter, a.k.a "ape prison". Here he is treated like his own kind and develops an emotional understanding of what it means to be a true ape. The audience has no choice but to feel an emotional connection to the character. This is where he indubitably organizes his ape-like militia to escape and begin the planet takeover in order to achieve an overall primate vengeance against the humans. One of the humans that mistreats Caesar and his new friends is character Dodge Landon, son of the primate facility owner John Landon. Dodge is portrayed by actor Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies). I just cannot get over how similar Felton's two characters were, it truly bothered me, but that's just a personal problem. John is played by Brian Cox.
With such a simple plot and complex character emotions, this film was truly great. There isn't really anything that I would change.
I anticipate and hope for a sequel.
9/10 Stars.