There's just something really satisfying about seeing a bunch of chimps go ape-shit.
Rupert Wyatt's film serves as a...ugh..."reboot" of the well-known franchise, and in doing so he has crafted a rare thing - a blockbuster with strong characters, scientific rigour and moral implications that stay with you afterwards.
The premise is misleadingly simple - James Franco's character is developing a gene therapy for Alzheimer's (with good reason, as his father suffers from it) and testing it on chimpanzees. While it seems to be successful, it has an unexpected side-effect - one of the test chimpe, Caesar, is becoming super-duper-smart. I think you can probably tell where the film goes after that.
The story can be well-predicted by any savvy enough viewer, but the realisation of it is truly great. What we have here is essentially a slow burner that dedicates time to the different characters, to develop them and to create a solid structure on which the events that follow can be built. Over the course of the running time the tension slowly builds until eventually it all pays off with a few revelatory scenes ("NNNNNOOOOOO!!") and the aforementioned "chimps going ape-shit" denouement that sets the stage for a refreshed franchise to continue. There is also plenty of subtle hints at things to come, such as news reports of a lost mission to Mars, an evil human-hating super-smart chimp called Koba and indications of how the human race disappears, leaving the apes to rule.
The interactions between the different characters are riveting, particularly those between Caesar and the other apes in the facility he is eventually kept in. These moments give great depth to the proceedings. The film slips a little with the human characters, in particular the romance between Franco and the vet seemed a little glossed over, but at the end of the day that's not what the film is about. There are tender moments between Franco and his father (John Lithgow) and more tense moments between Franco and his boss at GenSys, where his desperation to create a cure shows.
Serkis is the true star of this show though.
Everything else is commendable - the music and the action all fit in unintrusively, and the digital effects are entirely believable. It could have been a little heavy handed with the issue of testing on animals, and there are a few moments in the dreadful facility where we're shown how crap it must be for caged wild animals and how some people are just cruel and ignorant, but for the most part it doesn't take any one side in particular and lets you make up your own mind.
A great film.
9/10
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