James Franco plays Will Rodman, a San Francisco Big Pharma scientist with a dad (John Lithgow) in the late-middle stages of Alzheimer’s. In search of a cure, Rodman tests a gene-therapy serum called ALZ 112 on chimps, which get smarter by the day — until there’s a horrific mishap and the creatures are euthanized. (It turns out even super-intelligent apes retain their ape ferocity.) But the star chimp, “Bright Eyes,” has given birth and passed the genetic changes onto the baby. Rodman slips the infant out of the lab and raises it at home, where it’s soon signing, bonding with Rodman Sr. (in remission thanks to ALZ 112), and struggling to find a middle ground between its evolved chimp intellect and primal chimp instincts. Caesar is rather damaged even before he’s (I’m switching to the human pronoun) picked up by Animal Control and dumped in a facility run by Brian Cox (who starred in Wyatt’s first feature, The Escapist) and an overacting Tom Felton, who sneers even more aggressively than he did as Draco Malfoy. It’s the sort of prison — Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are others — that can radicalize even non-radicals., watch rise of the planet of the apes movie It’s likely that the writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and the director Rupert Wyatt were as familiar with Nim — who was mistakenly thought to understand human language and was later tragically abandoned by his handlers — as they were with the “Apes” franchise. (The filmmakers nod to the earlier movies repeatedly, as with a lost space team and a toy Statue of Liberty.) Then again, the exploitation of animals in the name of human progress is a horror-fiction staple, and in the 1960s and ’70s screens overflowed with marauding rats, bunnies, sharks and yet more apes as the magical animals of the Walt Disney generation gave way to fanged and furry avengers of the hippie nation. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” may be primarily a calculated business decision, but it’s also a smiley wag (or flick) of the environmental finger., watch rise of the planet of the apes movie In a recent Playboy interview, James Franco talked about his work in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes the way a lot of people talk about punching in at Taco Bell, referring to it as “actor-for-hire” work and saying he didn’t consider it “an example of my creativity.” While those sound like the words of an actor distancing himself from an obvious stinker, Franco could have just been expressing what’s obvious from the film’s first frames: This isn’t a film driven by humans. They aren’t completely removed from the action—someone has to keep the plot rolling. But as Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes makes good on its title’s promise, humanity gets pushed toward the margins as the apes take center stage. In a film not short on clever touches, one of the cleverest is the way it makes its human characters increasingly irrelevant as the world they thought was theirs starts to slip through their fingers., Making the most of special effects breakthroughs pioneered on Avatar as well as on the extensive ape performance background of Andy “King Kong” Serkis, Rise closes the door on the makeup-and-hairpiece monkeyshines of the original Apes sequels once and for all. The success of the new film pivots on viewer belief that the genetically advanced primates here possess emotional and cranial capacities similar to those of humans; so completely is this achieved that audiences will be cheering for these sensitive creatures as they take revenge on their tormentors by launching an unusually ambitious animal-liberation movement., watch rise of the planet of the apes movie Another questionable element is the extent of the apes’ conversational abilities. When Caesar at last utters his first word, it’s undeniably a big moment. But the most effective simian interchanges are physical rather than verbal, so it will be a tricky tightrope to walk — if the series continues, which it likely will — to move the apes into full speech in a credible way.
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