A great story ruined by laughable CGI

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2011)

Remakes, sequels, and prequels – oh my! You can't go one week without encountering one of these. August is particularly ridiculous – we have Conan the Barbarian (IN THREEE DEE!!), Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Fright Night (1985 original), Final Destination 5, Spy Kids (IN FOUR DEE!), and Don't' Be Afraid of the Dark (1973 original). Weigh that against the 5 or 6 wide releases that are (somewhat) original, and we've got a sad state of affairs. At least we have Another Earth and Griff the Invisible providing some indie relief.
You can understand my fears at seeing yet another attempt to exploit nostalgia and that "if it worked once, we can rape their wallets again!" attitude, but I went in with an open mind. Despite my dramatics, I did really want to see Rise. I am, without good reason, a James Franco fan and the trailer was gripping. CGI looked pretty cheesy, but I can sometimes get past that. Sometimes.
James Franco plays brilliant researcher Will Rodman who is on the brink of cracking Alzheimer's with the drug ALZ-112. I've tried to find any trivia behind the name, but honestly it just appears to stand for Alzheimer's and the trial number. How will film students ever find hidden meaning!?!? Anyhoo, the drug shows great promise in one particular chimp, but she goes haywire leaving behind a genetically superior ape-child later named Caesar. Showing compassion, but mostly playing God, Rodman takes Caesar home and raises him as a brilliant child-pet. Caesar, like all good chimps, eventually goes never mind, I'm not making that joke. He is interred at an ape concentration camp and that's where the Rise begins.
The movie really had me torn. On one hand, I really liked the story. Caesar's growth and changes were subtle, although the turning point against Rodman seemed a bit arbitrary. On the other hand, the CGI was okay at best and really goofy at worst. Let's talk story first.
I couldn't really tell what the writers were going for with Caesar and the other apes – racial discrimination, the Holocaust, Roman citizenship ideals – all of these elements appear in one way or the other through some of the, at times, heavy-handed plot devices (you're welcome, film students). Obviously as Caesar, he was destined to be the great general to lead his people to victory, and he did just that. Another picking point for me was the portrayal of pre-ALZ-113 apes. They were smart. Really smart. I know apes have the potential to be very smart, but not as smart as they were. Perhaps Caesar had already given them a mild infection with his smart-virus, but all of the schoolyard bullying sequences at the ape sanctuary seemed far-fetched and overplayed. Beyond those points, the story had simplicity that I didn't expect. I'm not complaining – I'd rather have a well crafted, simple story than a movie with so many twists and turns that it eventually writes itself in to a corner and ends unsatisfactorily. Rise definitely crafted its key moments well, despite my complaints.
The CGI will hurt this movie in my final grade. A-grade story, C-grade CGI. I get that motion capture has come a long way, but it still looks goofy when you have any sort of extreme motion like running, jumping – you know, all of the action parts of the movie. The climax really became laughable with the exaggerated, unnatural motions of the CGI apes swarming the Golden Gate Bridge. Any of Caesar's movements made by Andy Serkis were appropriate and natural, but since he can't swing around, that's where it got odd. I was able to overlook this with one ape, but a whole army of them was just too much.
The story did a good job of setting up the originals, although the utterance of The Line made me roll my eyes, but the CGI took me out of the movie at key points and really set it on a downward trajectory once the action ramped up.