Ok, let me first say, I’ve always found Planet of the Apes kind of cheesy. And I expected this to be no different. But I was wrong. In fact, I’ve never been MORE wrong. This film is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time.
James Franco’s performance as Will is great. He’s proving to be an incredibly versatile actor, and he carries this film superbly. John Lithgow is also great as Wills unwell father, who inevitably becomes a bit of a human guinea pig for Wills experiments, as he tries to save his father from sucumbing to Alzeihmers.
But the real stars of this film are the Apes themselves. At the beginning of the film, the CGI seemed a little dodgey, but by the end the Apes all look amazing, and the performances are so fantastic you feel like you’re watching real actors, not monkeys. You end up really caring about Caesar, and the ordeal he goes through which leads to the inevitable uprising of the Apes. Andy Serkis, who did the motion capture for Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings’, recorded the motion capture for Caesar in this film, and it’s a testament to just how amazing he is. This isn’t like watching ‘Avatar’ or ‘Beowulf’, this is like watching monkeys at the zoo. It’s truly is amazing to see.
There’s also some great nods to the original film, with newspaper articles about the “first maned mission to Mars”, and also a very funny little scene with Caesar building a model of the Statue Of Liberty, and a certain phrase uttered by one character to Caesar that was met with cheers in the screening I attended.
TO SEE THE REST OF THE REVIEW, HEAD ON OVER TO WWW.TOSEEORNOTTOSEE.NET