If this is the future of Hollywood...

Rating: 4/10 (2 September 2012)

then I think I'll stick to watching older or foreign films. Despite a prevalence of positive reviews in the press, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (who thought of THAT title?) turns out to be one of the most disappointing films I've seen all year. It's nothing more than a CGI-laden special effects extravaganza which, like much other recent fare, forgets to tell a story along the way.
The film is conceived as a kind-of prequel to the classic PLANET OF THE APES films, but it doesn't really work out that way. The long-winded narrative, about a drug that increases intelligence and the eventual way it finds itself into chimpanzees, could have been dusted over in the first ten minutes of the movie. I seem to recall Danny Boyle's 28 DAYS LATER treading similar ground in the first two or three minutes, but here the entire film is devoted to entirely predictable – and overly familiar – events. It all builds to a CGI set-piece which is yawn-inducing rather than technically impressive, and then the film just ends without any kind of attempted closure. The bridge scene that ends the movie is pure over the top trash, something I'd expect from a TRANSFORMERS movie, which is on the same level as this film.
I'm pretty sure that end-of-the-world thrillers like this are supposed to be frightening and suspenseful, and yet RISE forgets to bring either of those things to the table. It's also crushingly tame, going for a PG-13 rating when it should have been restricted. I mean, if you wanted to make the film believable AT ALL, you should have shown these chimps ripping off arms and faces; after all, that's the real behaviour when they go feral. You only have to follow the news to realise that. But RISE presents them as a sanitised and noble species. It's pure fantasy.
The actors sleepwalk through their roles, with only the old dependable John Lithgow giving anything approaching a good performance. Brian Cox literally shows up to pick up his paycheque, and as for Tom Felton trying to act after Malfoyoh dear. Freida Pinto shows up for one of those pretty-girlfriend-hanging-on-the-hero's-arm type roles, and as for James Franco, well to say he's slumming it would be to over-praise him. Even worse, he has no reason to be in the film at all, his character is totally extraneous to the plot other than at the outset.
My real venom, though, is directed towards the apes themselves, which for the first time are completely CGI generated. Please, bring back the men in suits! These CGI effects are dated already, just a year after the film came out, and they're never believable or indeed realistic. Not one bit. And when I hear Andy Serkis, a guy who's made an entire career out of playing Gollum, waffling on about how motion capture brings an emotional core to these creations, I feel a little bit sick inside. No, Andy, it doesn't bring ANY emotion whatsoever. These things are one-dimensional cartoons and you're kidding yourself if you think otherwise. You're there to provide motion and that's it. Don't keep bigging yourself up.