Excellent premise to show how apes might have come to take over from humans.

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 2014)

Last week my wife and I saw the newer Apes movie, "Dawn of..." and while watching it, and getting a glimpse of Caesar's back-story, we realized we had never seen this one, "Rise Of...". So we watched it last night.
As an overall impression I think this one is clearly a more interesting movie. It is about a scientist, played by James Franco, working to develop a type of virus that would repair brain cells. He had a particular interest as his dad living with him had already begun to develop dementia.
The virus works but eventually the body develops autoimmune responses making its effect temporary, so he has to tailor a different virus.
Meanwhile the apes used for research at his company get some of the virus and begin to exhibit signs of greatly enhanced intelligence. An incident causes them to put down all the apes but the scientist finds that one of the Chimp females had a newborn, with the green specs in his eyes, indicating he had inherited the intelligence.
Bringing him home and naming him Caesar he progresses very rapidly with intelligence absent from other Chimps.
So where the "Dawn Of..." features the apes in their own colony in Muir Woods, eventually battling the humans in San Francisco, this one contains all the events that lead up to that, how the apes gained intelligence and how they escaped to form their own colony.
Good movie!
SPOILERS: Caesar (played well in motion-capture by Andy Serkis) ends up in a facility for apes outside San Francisco. He figures out that the serum his "dad" was working on could give all the apes intelligence so he plans a break-out and theft to do that, then they all break out to go to Muir Woods, having to battle and defeat police on the Golden Gate Bridge to get there. Meanwhile we see that the last virus is harmful to humans, it gets transferred to the neighbor, an airline pilot, and as the movie ends we see a graphic depicting this virus being spread all over the world. In "Dawn Of..." we learn the virus that made the apes smart also killed most of the Earth's population.