It starts in the jungle with the brutal capture of a female chimpanzee who’s taken to the Gen-Sys laboratory of Will Rodman (James Franco), a scientist who wants to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease that is slowly destroying his father (John Lithgow.) He experiments the drug he’s developing on the ape that he calls Bright Eyes and it becomes intelligent. But on the day he’s presenting it to their business partners, Bright Eyes suddenly becomes violent and goes on rampage.
She is killed, but it turns out she was just protecting her baby left in her cage. Will then takes home the baby ape and takes care of it. His dad dotes on it and names it Caesar. He also applies the drug on his dad and he suddenly recovers fully. Five years pass. His dad’s brain deteriorates again and goes out to drive their neighbor’s car, ending in disaster. The neighbour threatens to harm the old man, Caesar sees it and goes out to help his benefactor, causing him to harm the neighbor.
For this, he is taken to a shelter for apes where he is maltreated by a sadistic assistant (Tom Felton, who’s Draco Malfoy in “Harry Potter”). At this point, Caesar has become so smart that he becomes the leader of all the other apes. By the time the apes escape and wreak havoc on San Francisco to seek abode in its redwood forest, we already sympathize with them.
The well written script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (“Hand that Rocks the Cradle”) and competent direction by Rupert Wyatt succeed in making us suspend our disbelief as we do root for the apes. The ending shows that they’re sure it’ll be a hit as they already prepared for the next installment, with the infected neighbor pilot now on his way to New York, which will obviously the setting of the next film. The film also works because CGI special effects on the apes are so convincing, especially on the performance capture technique used on Andy Serkis (who’s also Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings”) that mirrors all the nuances of his eyes and facial expressions as Caesar persuasively.
James Franco does quite well as the lead human character but it’s Caesar who’ll remember here, not him. Freida Pinto of “Slumdog Millionaire” as his love interest plays a mainly decorative role. The real stars here are Caesar and the other apes like Rocket, the bully in the shelter who tries to terrorize Caesar; Buck, a powerful gorilla kept inside a cage; and Maurice, an orangutan who used to perform in a circus and knows sign language. The special FX team of Weta Digital of New Zealand did fantastic work on them particularly in the action scenes when they swing across the city on tree tops and take charge of Golden Gate Bridge in the breathtaking climax, making this one of the best U.S. summer releases this year.
