Dazzling Special Effects Spoiled By Mediocre Plot

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is groundbreaking in its use of motion capture technology but unfortunately the plot is pretty weak.
First of all, if you've seen the previews of the film, you pretty much already know the plot, which takes away a great deal of enjoyment when watching it, already knowing what's going to happen, that is. The entire premise of having a big chimpanzee named Ceasar living under your roof is kind of implausible, especially since the next door neighbor objects so much and would have probably filed a complaint way before any of the real mayhem would have taken place. Also, I didn't buy how cruel the managers of the ape habitat, where Ceaser had to go after attacking the neighbor, were to their apes. If they hated apes so much why were they in the ape housing business in the first place? Most people who run zoos or animals shelters do so because they love animals. So that made no sense AT ALL. The ultimate bit of nonsense was how Ceasar knew to go to the lab and steal the canisters of virus and then bring them back to expose all the apes to it. Nothing in the plot suggested why he should have known how to do that, other than one sentence in which he was told that "medicine" made him smarter. And then all of a sudden, after all the apes escaped, there were hundreds of them instead of a few dozen of them, and they for some reason had superpowers and could smash straight through big panes of glass without getting injured and could pull spears right off wrought iron fencing. If you ever see a wrought iron fence with pointy spikes on top try pulling one of them from its welding and see how far you get. Guess what, an ape can't do it either. Then after what could have only been hours after the apes escaped, the police were already all organized on horseback and in helicopters and in cars with machine guns, road blocking the bridge and ready to massacre an army of apes at will. Yeah, right. Give me a break.
Nevertheless, this is a really fun movie and the inside jokes that refer to the original movie are great. And as I said, the special effects alone make this movie deserving of a score of 7--it's just too bad the writing wasn't better because this could have been a perfect 10.