Better late than never right?
Again, being wrong.....yea, I was wrong about this one. My first thought was "Was James Franco sober when he decided to do this?". Then I asked myself "When is James Franco sober?". All joking aside, this was a very good prequel to the series, albeit not great.
The movie is about Will Rodman (James Franco), a scientist working on a cure to Alzheimer's disease, which afflicts his father Charles (played by John Lithgow). The company that Will works for is testing Wills gene therapy drug, which is a kind of virus, is using chimpanzees for the trial tests before moving onto human test subjects. One of the chimps goes berserk, destroying the facility and attacking humans at the building where Will is giving a presentation to the board of directors so Will can move onto the next phase of his project. After that happens, Wills program is terminated and all the chimps are put to sleep, sans the one birthed by the berserk chimp, who was just trying to protect its young. Will takes the baby chimpanzee, names him Caesar, and raises him in his home for the next few years. Caesar inherited the effects of the gene therapy, and displays amazing cognitive abilities. Will goes back to work, showing off both Caesars and his fathers results, and is granted the necessary funding to continue his work. I'll leave the rest of the major plot alone, but I'm pretty sure you guys can guess where it all goes.
Overall, this was a very good movie. One of the surprising good actors was Tom Felton, playing the son of the owner of a ape sanctuary, and he pulled off his role of evil overseer extremely well. His American accent was very spot-on, and he even said the two lines from the original Plant of the Apes, with extremely good delivery. I think Tom Felton may have a better chance at having a post Potter career than most of the other cast (that didn't already have a career). The one usual good actor (sort of actor) was Andy Serkis, who did the motion capture for the apes. Even though everything was re-dubbed with CG, his movements are some of the best and most life-like I've ever seen. Now the generals: good cinematography, good scripting, mostly good pace. It explained a lot of what happened to the Earth that would cause the apocalypse of humanity and conquest by the apes.
I did have several problems with this movie. One was of the love story, between Will and Caroline, played by Freida Pinto. It felt very shoe-horned in, and almost entirely unnecessary. There we some dull points, and a lot of it were very talkie scenes full of techno-babble that doesn't hold well up to scrutiny (sometimes suspension of disbelief isn't enough). Another was the over use of CG in this film. No, not the apes. The apes were supposed to be CG, because they were doing things that apes can't do. I mean using CG where a real-life actor or set piece or something could be used. One of the best examples of this is a car making a right turn....and that's it. It's not like that couldn't have been done with a normal car, but it was done with CG. Finally, one of the thing that wasn't covered was how humanity regresses to Stone Age style thought as well as technology levels. I thought this would be a very important thing to go over and tie the movie to the Planet of the Apes.
I'd probably watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes once more, but that would be it. As a movie, it was good, and I had very low expectations of it until I saw it. It still fell to some pretty common Hollywood foul-ups, but if you want a good movie to rent, not own, give it a look.
Pros: Overall good, Tom Felton was surprisingly good, helps explain how the world got to where it was in Planet of the Apes.
Cons: Overuse of CG, useless shoe-horned romance sub-plot, I was wrong again.
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