Monkey see, Monkey don't.

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2011)

So what can be said of the latest reboot in the Planet of the Apes saga? Well in a nutshell 'Rise' is pretty poor, while trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's Will Rodman accidentally increases brain power in his pet monkey who goes mad and has to be locked up, monkey doesn't like being locked up and so starts to get the other monkeys to rise up with him in order to go and do some damage to the city. In a world where only the monkeys age and harry potters nemesis is a monkey tormentor we get everything from homo-erotic monkey love to a snakes on a plane style line 'oh you monkeys' delivered seemingly without irony. With self-sacrificing silver-backs to an orangutan that is fluent in sign language the primates are OK when they finally go on the rampage but it takes so long to get there that by the time they were beating up the police I'd already long lost interest. Lots of reviews I read also praised the set piece on the golden gate bridge saying how brilliant it was! What the hell, they roadblock the bridge to stop the monkeys getting past, but guess what they monkeys still get past! But how I hear you cry? How is that possible? Well by swinging underneath, oh my god that is just brilliant, monkeys swinging who would have thought! It's so breathtakingly amazing, not. I'm pretty sure that 98% of this film is CGI including James Franco who had to wear a motion capture suit for all his scenes then was painstakingly animated back in by a team of fifty computer experts to get him to look just like James Franco; you can see where the money was spent. One of the most bizarre things about the whole movie was the end because well it just stops dead in its tracks. I couldn't believe it when the credits started to roll; it was Jurassic Park 3 all over again, is that it? Seriously? Where's the end? So if you want me to save you some money/time it goes like this: over an hour of boring stuff about chemicals and experiments with the odd monkey, being locked up dreaming of the outside more monkeys, one gorilla, loads of mad monkey action, a few gorillas and an orangutan and stop.