Superb

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2012)

This movie is first-rate science fiction - the special effects are outstanding and the story is very touching in spots. Although the main character's father's Alzheimers is a plot device, Lithgow plays it with pathos, which should touch the hearts of anyone who has dealt with loved ones experiencing mental decline. As many have remarked, the "motion capture" technique applied to the apes allows for full, nuanced expressiveness and "Caesar," too, becomes a moving character. Needless to say, if someone is looking for credibility he or she will not find it in this film, but my main criticism - SPOILER - would be that while it is ingenious for the decline of humans to be due to a virus they have created (rather than at the hands of a few rampaging super-apes), it raised a lot of questions like "Why didn't Franco's infected lab assistant e-mail or call him instead of giving up when he couldn't find him at home?" Another weakness was the ho-hum attitude of the main protagonist and his wife toward the miraculous and potentially dangerous situation under their own roof in the form of the "altered" chimpanzee. Sure, they took note of it but nobody seemed "blown away" by it. However, the weaknesses in "human" protagonists were more than offset by the mesmerizing performance by Andy Serkis (as Caeser) and the armies of motion-capture and/or computer graphics specialists.