I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes back when it opened last month, and the film turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Saddled with the stigma of a reboot that no one's asked for, not only does this prove to be far superior to Burton's 2001 effort, but it's also one of the better late summer cinematic highlights in recent memory.

Rupert Wyatt is a director new to me, but with Rise, he delivers a movie that's not only well written, but confidently shot.  The themes of oppression and man playing god are central: others might disagree, but I love that James Franco's story arc gets equal treatment to Caesar's, both developed enough so that one never threatens to fully outweigh the other.  Franco lends a credible performance, and you buy into his plight; he fights an ongoing battle between his ethics as a scientist, and devotion to his father and Caesar.  But naturally, audiences come to see Caesar.  A cinematic wonder from the folks at Weta, Andy Serkis continues to perfect his craft in the field of motion capture performance, creating a multi-faceted character that's engaging to watch within every single frame that he's in.  From loyal friend, to hardened prisoner, and eventual freedom fighter, you emphasize with Caesar throughout.

Like Thor, Patrick Doyle delivers a soundtrack that takes its cues from the RC handbook.  There's still plenty of Doyle mannerisms on display, however, and it's a pretty muscular score with a large variety of instrumentation.  A thematic heart beats in this beast, but sometimes it's hard to make it out due to the overall aggressiveness of the music.

There are a few other imperfections.  Plot holes begin to crop up, like, "Why does Gen-Sys have such questionably lax security and protocol methods?" and "How did so many apes end up taking part in the uprising by the end?"  There are some fun Easter eggs and throwbacks to the Arthur P. Jacobs original movies, though they're a bit too on the nose and self-aware at times.  Tom Felton carries over a bit (okay, a lot) of his dick-headed Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series, making his character obtrusively one-dimensional.  Those minor qualms aside, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a terrific sci-fi blockbuster with a flair for sophistication and heart, not only excelling as a standalone film in the franchise, but also feeling like a natural prequel tie-in to the original 1968 movie.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ … f-the-Apes

Been meaning to give it a watch. Don't have much time for myself nowadays, but maybe I'll drag the missus to see it when we both have a day off.

Movie ends up failing because of a stupidddddddd completely implausible underdeveloped subplot that should have never existed. The ending also had me crying bullshit. It was bad enough that games are being rush released with episodic content, but now movies!?

I'd give the movie a 3/5 tops.

Very, very late to this but I finally got to see this yesterday. I'm a big Apes fan, with Conquest being a real favourite, so an Apes movie would always have a lot to live up to for me. And, well, I can still smell the lingering stench of that Burton abomination.

But Rise?

That is an Apes movie that can stand proudly among the classics. In many ways, even taking into account differences in budget and time they were made, It's better than most of them. Yeah, the main catalyst of the story (science will kill us all!) has been overdone and I thought the original origins had much more weight to them but that didn't matter because it was just a catalyst, not the story itself. The story was Caesar, who he was and who he became.

And I felt they told that story brilliantly.

The CG was hit and miss. Some of the secondary apes looked like real apes so I can only assume it was a deliberate design choice to make Caesar look a bit like a half human hybrid but, even with that, the rendering was inconsistent. Sometimes he was solid, other times he seemed painted on to the frame. And they still can't do motion blur in CG.

But the actual performances of all the apes were amazing.

I loved that each one was a character and, oranutan intelligence leap aside, they seemed to act like apes in an ape society. I came to really root for all the apes, even the bully one.

Some of the more human elements were a bit one-note (mostly in the bad guys, who were too bad guyish) but even then most of them worked and served the story well.  But the apes were the stars.

Yep, I loved it. It will be interesting to see where they go from here if they do a sequel. I kind of hope they'll leap some years in to the future rather than do a direct sequel - the differences in time period was something that made the original apes films very interesting (aside from Beneath, of course, which was a bit pants).

This finally came to Japan so I saw it tonight.  Hearing a lot about how well received it was back home I tried to temper my expectations a bit coming into it, but in any case I came out of the movie totally impressed.

It's one of those very few movies that tells a story through its special effects that just couldn't be told otherwise, not to mention the rare summer blockbuster that has both some intelligence and some emotional weight. Except for a couple slightly sped through plot points the story is excellently designed and though the human characters range from believable to only marginally serviceable the character development of Caesar is brilliant.

With the movie thankfully taking its time to build the story, the more action-focused third act feels a bit short for a summer blockbuster, but still it offers more really impressive action shots than certain other movies from the summer that dwelt far, far longer on the action.

I'll definitely be seeing it again on Blu-ray and will be curious to see how it holds up to repeat viewings.