Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a Review

Spoiler alerts, I guess? I mean, you already know that the apes are going to rise and eventually talk and wear shoulder pads and torment Charlton Heston. And if you didn’t know that, you probably never had a super-traumatic second-grade sleepover experience which resulted in your dad needing to pick you up because TOO SCARY.

Anyway, RotPotA is amazing for…thirty minutes. Amazing. First, you have to sit through seventy minutes of agonizing, pointless explication of Why the First Smart Ape is So Smart and Living With James Franco, which you don’t even NEED if you’ve seen ‘Deep Blue Sea,’ as it’s the *exact same premise.* Sympathetic, risk-taking scientist cutting corners because of an Alzheimer’s-ridden father! Bottom-line oriented African-American businessman trying to keep said scientist in check! Animals become too smart! Mayhem!

If I had the chance to come on as a script doctor, which would never, ever happen, I would have included five minutes on the science, five minutes on Franco taking the chimp home, a thirty-second montage of Franco and Pinto and the chimp frolicking in the redwoods (set to ‘In the Summertime,’ like in ‘Wedding Crashers’), the chimp getting taken by animal control, and then we could get more quickly into the apes ACTUALLY RISING, which, trust, is what you want. More yeast, less (the amazing) John Lithgow bumming us out and making us aware of mortality and senescence.

Sidenote: One has to imagine that actual Alzheimer’s researchers at parties occasionally get asked about whether or not they’ve tried ‘making bigger shark brains.’ Guys, you should try that!

So, you know, Caesar the Ape is in a craptastic ape prison, being mistreated by Draco Malfoy, and within ten minutes, you absolutely want the apes to rise up and destroy us all. No death is too horrible for Draco Malfoy. When the apes eventually get him, you will be disappointed. Trust. They should have eaten his face. Chimps do that shit all the time. Weak.

And then, right, there are just too many apes. We start off with about forty in Ape Prison, they free about twenty from Science Ape Prison, twenty from the zoo, and suddenly there are at least six hundred apes swarming all over San Francisco. Which is great, because that’s the fun part, especially when Caesar hops on a police horse and starts throwing tridents at the fuzz.

After the amazing thirty minutes it gets cheesy for four minutes, and then amazing again for one minute during the credits.

Except you do wind up feeling bad for the neighbor, since, yeah, he’s kind of a juicebox, but I think James Franco and his super-intelligent ape and his car-jacking senile parent were terrible neighbors for a very long time. Sorry, surly neighbor. You deserved better.

So, if you fit into the target demographic: people with a working credit card who feel guilty about animals but not necessarily enough to suffer more than the most minor inconveniences to improve their lot, you should absolutely go see this movie.