Worth the watch

Rating: 6/10 (25 September 2011)

So for those of you who don't know, this is prequel to the original 1968 film, and illustrates how exactly the race of apes came to be so intelligent. The main reason I clear this up now is because I don't want you to be the person at the theater to say "I hope there's a sequel" like the person I saw when I was there to see it.
Anyway... The human characters in the film are actually rather interesting and well-developed. That would be a good thing, however most of them stop making regular appearances roughly halfway through the film. Will Rodman, the protagonist, seems like a very likable guy. He wants to develop a cure for mental disorders, particularly Alzheimer's, which his father suffers greatly from. The rest of the characters are rather typical, to be honest. Steven Jacobs is your average 'rush the project' money-grubber. Will urges to him that his cure may not be quite stable yet, however Steven insists on getting it out there immediately. Once Caesar is taken into a primate shelter, he is synonymous to that of an intelligent high school student attending an average school with average students. He is treated like a 'stupid monkey' (by Dodge, a worker at the shelter refers to him as once). The workers are very generic and predictable teenagers with a barely-present personality that could be considered legitimate.
So basically half of the characters are interesting, the others aren't at all. However it doesn't matter since they fade out of the picture towards the climax of the film.
(Spoilers may be present from here on out; you've been warned) The plot itself is fairly decent. Caesar must be put in a primate shelter because it soon becomes apparent that a full-grown ape can't easily live in a normal town. Since this a prequel, you now know the beginning and the end of the tale. A monkey is given a medicine that makes him exceptionally-intelligent, and after a long while there will be an entire race of incredibly smart apes. The only remaining doubt is how that comes to be. My first thought was a very sarcastic "Oh, Caesar is going to mate with monkeys in the shelter and spread the intelligence trait; very clever" however I literally cocked my eyebrow once I realized that I was quite far off. I won't completely spoil it, though.
Once Caesar begins his revolt, much of the film cuts down on dialog and swaps it for action. Albeit the action is pretty satisfying to watch, however I had grown attached to the human characters at this point. The story doesn't greatly develop after the escape; they fight off the military for a while, until Will is able to finally calm Caesar down at the end of the film.
While I do realize that this isn't "Rise of the Planet of the Humans" however the characters were introduced as though they would be playing a large role throughout the entire film. Shortly after Caesar begins the revolt, there is a lot of times when I honestly faded completely out of attention briefly. The actions going on weren't interesting enough to keep me attentive (that is until they finally escape; things turn into Michael Bay-like action at that point) nor was there any dialog or character development.
In my humble opinion, a movie needs to have either solid action or an adequate and moving story with developing characters. This movie has both of those, just not at the same time. It's not bad, however don't watch it hoping for an extremely interesting story for the whole film.