Standard "Action Flick" Fare

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2011)

If you like mindless entertainment and you're prepared to just "go with it" and suspend disbelief no matter what the movie, or Fox, may throw at you, then Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the movie for you, and you should skip the rest of this review.
People will likely call this an "action flick," or an "effects flick," which, as often happens, means the plot is rife with a great deal of silliness. Such as the million dollar research lab that doesn't notice one of their test chimps is pregnant until it gives birth. Such as the "wonder drug" that makes one (1) chimp "smarter," so therefore we're all set to go into clinic trials on humans suffering from Alheimer's. Such as the scientist who decides to test out the untested drug on his own (human) father, because, hey, Dad's practically a basket case, so what harm could it do?
Overall, the film seems uninspired and continues the modern trend of substituting eye-candy for creative thinking. It doesn't really feel very science-fictiony either. The world setting is indistinguishable from the real-life modern-day Earth we all know, except for a TV news broadcast about a manned space flight mission to Mars. The "science" perpetrated by the film's protagonist mostly takes the form of computer displays showing lots of unreadable charts and graphs and data and stuff, which is not terribly convincing.
The interactions between the various apes in the film do get interesting, round about the middle of the film. The apes all seem to move "realistically," at least to my zoologically untrained eye. But that alone is hardly enough to carry the film, especially since the climactic action sequence at the end of the film appears to have been designed by graphics effects people, without reference to anyone concerned with such arcana as "logic" and "plot."