The apes are awesome, the humans are uninteresting

Rating: 7/10 (8 August 2011)

The plot of this film is very similar to the recent horror movie Splice. Here, James Franco plays a scientist whose big presentation flops when his experimental chimp goes nuts and attacks a bunch of people. When ordered to destroy all of his experimental subjects, he steals a baby chimp to raise and experiment on at home. The ape, which his father (John Lithgow) names Caesar, is super-intelligent, but has his animal urges, too. This eventually leads to Caesar's discovery and imprisonment in a primate house. There he becomes a leader to the other apes, and, after he steals Franco's Alzheimer's vaccine, he makes them super-intelligent, too, which leads to an ape revolt. The movie is sometimes very well plotted, and at other times it's pure rote Hollywood filmmaking. The human story doesn't work as well as the ape story. John Lithgow's not bad as the Alzheimer's sufferer who inspires Franco's work, but Franco himself is fairly dull, and his love interest, Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto, has absolutely not a thing to do. Whenever the apes are on screen, though, it's an excellent film. Caesar is created with motion capture technology, with Lord of the Rings' Andy Serkis performing. He's absolutely brilliant. Not an exaggeration at all: you can see every thought in that chimp's head. While the special effects are easily identified as CGI (I think every ape in the film is CGI, because the difference would be too bothersome if any real apes were included), they are about as good as that technology is ever going to get. There are a lot of references to the original film, some of which are terrible (two of the film's most famous lines are included and sound ridiculous), but some of which (like naming the orangutan Maurice) made me smile.