Chix Chat on Film review: The Beginning of Ape world domination.

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2011)

I was really looking forward to seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, because I can recall as a child having seen a number of these ape based stories and they never seemed to really explain how this all came about. I wanted to see this story for the nostalgia factor and to see if it would align with the classics or the Mark Wahlberg version. It turned out to be more in tuned with the classics. This film does explain what happened to elevate the apes to the dominate species and in this age of scientific and technological advancement, the origin was completely plausible. Will Rodman (James Franco) is the antithesis of the mad scientist, but his obsession with finding a cure for degenerative brain disorders puts him right in that category. I was struck by how far he kept going in his quest for a cure while totally ignoring every single hint or warning. And his girlfriend Caroline Aranha (Frieda Pinto) was no help with the moral compass, she only once in five years questioned his ethics. Speaking of people behaving badly, Tom Felton (Dodge Landon) wasted no time putting himself out there with a persona other than Draco Malfoy, he did a respectable job with the American accent, and the trivia relative to his character's name is pretty cool. There was a lot of painstaking character development given to Caesar (Andy Serkis) that I didn't find necessary, it seemed to take forever to get to the climatic freeway bridge scene. Are chimps indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Region or did the residents go through some pet rock or rather pet chimp phase? The novelty of being a chimp owner must have worn off and then they called animal control to come and get their apes. There were so many apes that I finally just said 'oh come on, really?'. The special effects were nicely done, especially the freeway bridge scene. I thought about how many times I have seen that bridge destroyed in other movies and really expected to see Caesar pull out some C-4 or something and blow the bridge to get the humans off his trail, just kidding, although he did pull off some antics that were a bit much. Right, right I know heightened intelligence. I was quite satisfied with the adult Caesar's appearance, he looked remarkably realistic, the younger version of Caesar not so much. I came very close to giving this film a green light to match the enhanced ape's eyes, but decided on an amber light instead.