Rupert Wyatt pulled off an accomplished reboot of the popular sci-fi series that wisely takes the franchise back to the start of the ape regime, skipping the absurd melodrama of Tim Burton’s remake. Will Rodman (James Franco) is the scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s, with Ceasar (Andy Serkis) the ape who gets treated like a human being when his intellect begins to soar. Mistreated and confined to a cell with his fellow apes, Ceasar begins talking about a revolution, and Wyatt’s film ends with a dynamic revolt, with the apes causing mayhem on San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge. Likely to be the first in a long line of films about Ceasar’s struggle for power, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an intelligent and astutely written film that considers wider issues of animal and human rights without ever letting Ceasar become a monster; sketching the bedroom window that he misses on the wall of his cell, he’s a empathetic hero in a way that makes Franco’s scientist somewhat dispensable.
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