Fantastic CGI undermined by slow-moving plot and unconvincing characters

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2011)

CGI. It's the single best thing about this movie. All the apes in this movie look and seem real, and there are some fantastic scenes, such as a huge gorilla charging a policeman on a horse on the Golden Gate Bridge! The leader ape, Caesar, is portrayed through motion capture by Andy Serkis. Now, as movie fans know, Andy Serkis always steals the show. As Gollum he overshadowed Sir Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen and company, and as King Kong he made a painfully long, overindulgent film seem passable. Unfortunately for us, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is more like the latter.
Rupert Wyatt's directorial debut, The Escapist, was a competent effort, but one thing it was very good at was establishing character. It had a number of great character actors (Brian Cox in the lead, who also features in Rise of the Planet of the Apes), playing multi-dimensional roles. Unfortunately, this is actually the greatest weakness of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. James Franco plays Will Rodman, a scientist working on the cure of Alzheimer's, and the biggest problem about his character is that he does not act, feel or look like a scientist. Tobey Maguire was the original choice for this role before he had to drop out, and I certainly feel he would have been a better choice than his Spider Man co-star. Weaker still is Freida Pinto as Will's girlfriend who serves no purpose at all other than to occasionally warn Franco that he is tampering with things that should not be tampered with or something like that. Brian Cox and Tom Felton feature in one-dimensional roles who are laughable rather than creepy (especially Tom 'Draco Malfoy' Felton, who uses his Draco sneer in this film constantly). Finally there's David Oyelowo as Franco's money-centered boss, whose English accent is used to full effect to show how bad he is. Oyelowo's character is not developed at all, and he is the same over the number of years that the films plot goes over.
I would mention that John Lithgow's performance as Wills' Alzeimer's affected father is fairly convincing, but it does not reprieve the others.
The other major drawback is the slow plot, which lags in several places and does not serve up enough consistent action over the piece to keep entertainment-hungry teenagers happy. The end scenes, where apes begin to take a stand against the consistently nasty humans, are impressive, but by then - after being through so much back story spanning over a large number of years - I did not really care.
Lastly, and oddly, a huge drawback of the film was the marketing. As a huge movie fan, I viewed every trailer for this film, and unfortunately felt that I knew exactly what was coming since the trailer had every interesting scene in it, including in a lesser used trailer, the death of a significant character. It does not help that the film is a prequel, as the audience knows that apes succeed in taking over the world, so we know that they will not be destroyed by humans in the final battle. Because of this knowledge, it lacks tension.
In conclusion, it is certainly a watchable film, but another under-par summer blockbuster which is slow-moving and frankly boring in places. It is partially saved by the amazing CGI and conclusive battle, but this cannot quite this from getting away from a disappointing 6/10.