Monkeying around with a million dollars

Rating: Null/10 (1 December 2011)

What the hell is this thing anyway? I am left here puzzling at how starved we must be for tentpole entertainment, not just now but for a long time, to have a whole bunch of films about intelligent apes running amok.
There was Godzilla at one point, Night of the Living Dead. Beyond the allegoric politics of these films that offered something to chew on, one could easily posit the mayhem in a believable world. The only stretch was to accept a giant lizard or the dead rising from graves, beyond that the ensuing destruction was carried out with a natural, unplanned dumbness driven by instincts.
The sheer ludicrousness of this thing however defies belief. Let's just swallow young genius who invents miraculous cure but with unforeseen side-effects. The idea of an intelligent ape rallying his kin of regular primates around him to throw away the bonds of human oppression. In just what kind of world can a swarm of apes stomp around San Francisco unnoticed? How to solve this? Of course imbue with a a kind of supernatural speed and co-ordination that should go unquestioned because there wouldn't be a movie otherwise.
This perfectly prefaces the final segment. The apes are suddenly super intelligent, so it makes some sense that humans would behave like primates. So set up a SWAT roadblock on one end of the Golden Bridge, then have mounted police! storm in the firing range. Have them outwitted by excellent battle tactics, wherein a bunch of gorillas push an upturned bus for cover and one of them charges against a hellicopter. Eegad.
Dumb, ugly, preposterous. But of course it's a movie about apes run amok, we should make some concessions, right? So how to handle, in that light, the extremely cheesy 'human interest' angle about father and son, maker and creation? Perhaps this is the daftest thing here, the strained emotional earnestness meant to ground this in believable world dynamics.
What is the most troubling to me, is that all this has been received with mostly a straight face and a round of applause, as an example of the summer blockbuster done right. There is a movement lobbying for an Oscar nod to Andy Serkis.
The parting image is a laugh riot of unadulterated cheese. Or was it meant to elicit a spine-tingling sensation of awe and beauty?