Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Best movie of this year hands down!

hyped garbage

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This film really surprised me, really enjoyed it. James Franco gives one of his best performances. The special effects are also really well done.

Rise Of The Planet Of The ApesA solid start offering gripping screenplay, some tight action and well developed characters Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is a gift especially by Andy Serkis.

Although there was plenty of room for improvement here, there were a lot of things that I thought this movie did well. When I first saw the trailers back in 2011, it looked to me like the apes were the enemy that was trying to take over the world like in an alien invasion movie. However, I was pleasantly surprised upon finally seeing it this past summer to find that this is not at all an action driven movie. The trailers make it out to be an action movie, but in truth there is only one action scene at the climax. However, there is plenty to keep it interesting and exciting throughout the rest of the movie.The science/medicine/tech corporation that Will worked for felt a little bit standard, much like Oscorp from the Spiderman movies. However, the company was not looking to make any kind of military technology, which is seen in a lot of action movies. Instead, the writers decided to make the serum that makes Caesar smarter a drug that is intended to cure Alzheimers, which I think was a good choice. It made the entire movie feel more real and allowed it to put some more focus on some of the societal issues that come up in it. There is an active search for a cure to Alzheimers, and it is almost a certainty that pharmaceutical companies would test out their cure on animals before humans. Later, when Caesar gives all of the apes the serum, it makes sense that the first thing the apes would think about with their more intelligent minds would be the oppressive circumstances they are in. Even though animal cruelty was not a major theme of the movie, it was at least presented in a way that gave it more attention and made viewers more likely to think about how we treat animals than say the way the Avengers dealt with the Tessaract. The climatic battle also has more weight because the apes are not the aggressors. Rather they are simply trying to escape and live on their own; the fighting only ensues when the police try to stop them. Whether the serum would actually have such an extensive impact on chimps as it does in the movie is unlikely, but choosing to have the drug make the apes smarter rather than more aggressive like some movies might have done was a good choice in my opinion.I also really liked the way that the movie used their graphics and mo-cap when dealing with the apes. Like most computer graphics today, it did not make the apes look like real apes, but it at least looked clean enough that it wasn't distracting. But I especially liked the way that Caesar and the other apes were written, directed, and acted. Most of the times when intelligent animals are featured in movies, they either talk, or make incredibly annoying gestures and noises to make up for not being able to speak (see Curious George, Sven from Frozen, the chicken in Moana, the horses in Mulan and Tangled and El Dorado). Here, Caesar was able to communicate through sign, which is a much more realistic and eloquent way of making him a human character to the audience. Instead of trying to make Caesar overly cute or overly aggressive, they just made him seem more human. This made the moment when he finally speaks so much more powerful, at least for me.There were a few things that I disliked about it. Several shots that were used at the beginning and end of scenes felt rather clichéd and overused, especially as the pace of the movie picked up. Steven Jacobs, the head of the company, felt like kind of a caricature and I got a little annoyed by the way he was written. Last and worst was the young zookeeper Dodge Landon, who felt heinously unrealistic. He's a character that the audience is meant to hate, but I hated him even more because he just felt like a copy of a stereotypical punk, especially in the scene when he brings his friends in to see the apes.On the whole, I liked it and want to see the next two. It's by no means the perfect sci-fi movie, but sci-fi movies should strive to be more like this one. Overall Rating: 7.8/10.

This is a great start to another (and hopefully the last) reboot of a well-known franchise, Planet of the Apes. It's easy to say what definitely stands out: the visual effects. All of the CGI apes are incredibly realistic, especially Caesar (Andy Serkis) who is a terrific masterpiece, not only visually, but as a character as well. He's surprisingly the protagonist of the movie, a decision that I congratulate the director and production team for, because it transformed it into a much more captivating and interesting film.Andy Serkis is the God of motion capture, it's amazing the amount of emotion he's able to transmit as a guy in a spandex suit full of white dots on his face. Caesar is one of the most fantastic and intriguing characters I've ever watched and the fact that there's almost no dialogue throughout the film just proves that you can achieve great things with pure emotion (and some sign language ... ).James Franco is good portraying an also well-developed character, even if he wasn't as great as he could be. The script is very smart and emotional (mainly due to the extremely well-directed no-dialogue scenes) and the action is super awesome, particularly because of its emotional side. The fact that we actually care about the apes (maybe even more than the humans) elevates the action-heavy third act and brings the movie home (no pun intended), with a very strong ending.In spite of all this, it's still not a perfect film. Even if the runtime isn't properly long, the film's pacing (principally the second act) is really slow, which drags the movie into almost a boring state. As I said above, the story is captivating, but only when we're with Caesar and his respective families ... All of the human drama inside the Gen-Sys Laboratories isn't really interesting, but we still get too much of it.Finally, the side characters. Besides Caesar, Will and his father (brilliantly portrayed by John Lithgow), no one else got the chance to shine on the big screen. Most of them are plot devices in order to get the story going and actually have a film: the "bad guys" are just bad because ... Well, they're assholes, I guess they were born that way ... I would have preferred that they spent a little more time with those characters instead of the company's dramas.All in all, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an excellent start to this reboot that proves we don't need dialogue to transmit a great amount of emotion. The CGI is flawless, Caesar being the huge proof of what a masterpiece looks like, visually and character-wise. A slow pace and some under-developed side characters bring the movie down a bit, but the captivating and emotional story, plus a very well-directed action-heavy third act, elevate the film into one of the best in the whole franchise.MSB Reviews - If you like my reviews, please follow my blog :)