First Official Review For Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes - And It's A Good One!

The effect of this reconfiguration would be to make the film into a This Could Happen Story, or at least exaggerate the talking point components that relate to real world ideas. Rise would find it easier to talk about animal rights, not human rights. This new Apes was going to be an entirely different animal.

So I knew where the tone and style were going to be set when I went into the cinema and sat down. What I wasn’t so prepared for was where they were going to be set when I stood up to leave at the end.

David Oyelowo and Tom Felton get short shrift as a pair of villains with some very flat and openly functional dialogue and, at most, two dimensions of motivation between them. They take part in some memorable scenes, but are definitely the least interesting things in them and, had these characters been better drafted, the film would have been saved from its lowest dips. James Franco plays Caesar’s surrogate father and his delivery is recognisably Franco. This year in particular, that might stick in the craw, though I think his performance will age just fine. John Lithgow, as Franco’s father, gets the better scenes with Caesar, but fewer of them, though, as a fan, I can tell you that I was just happy to see him. Freida Pinto lands squarely in the ditch by both having an underwritten role and no wit to scrape anything out of it.

Director Rupert Wyatt does pull out a few bits of business that have no real use in telling the story, including a few goofy, pointless matches in his transitions. Thankfully, he’s mostly disciplined, and stages a number of scenes very well.

The film is cleverly plotted, for the most part, and the weave of old-Apes lore and new ideas is tight. Particularly satisfying is the very final scene of the film which provides a nice little character pay-off specific to this narrative and casts some big ripples in the bigger backstory and series context . Sweetly, this even continues into the end credits themselves, which are set against an animation that… I won’t spoil here. An amusing irony to go out on, however (and there’s a pun in this sentence somewhere).