So I just got back from watching The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Being a fan of the original, in the week since I watched the original no less, I was curious to see the prequel having not seen Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which I'm told this is loosely based off.
I'm going to write my 'Tl;dr' first, and hope people don't just take that and then leave. I liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes the Official Film of the Film. It's a very good sci-fi/drama/animal film with very well written characters.
Most of the time anyway, the characters that matter, though well written, are largely very bare bones, everything is said about them that needed to be said, no more, no less. Which works well for the more prominent characters but makes the lesser shown characters seen shallow. For example, the main two characters, Caeser the Chimpanzee, motion captured by Andy Serkis in another role where he's in a quadrupedal position, and Will Something-Or-Other, played by James Franco. Caeser's character arc revolves around his relationship with Will vs his relationship with other Apes, and it's a very well written character too, I was wearing blinkers on my mind's eye throughout the film, because I knew he would perform a certain action very early on, but didn't want to believe he would do such a thing, because he's so nice and cuddly right?
Will is the more bare bones of the two, his motivations are simple, the film begins with him developing a cure for Alzheimer's to help his ailing father (played by the bloke who plays the father in 3rd Rock from the Sun), and when testing it on Chimpanzees, finds that the effects cause increased intelligence that carry on along the genetic line of one test subject, who's baby Will adopts. Throughout the film, he continually attempts to help perfect the serum as well as taking care of the Chimpanzee, who he names Caeser. He's easy to understand and a very likable main character, you might argue a little bit too likable, every single thing he does is on the behalf of his father or Caeser, but I suppose being too nice isn't much of a problem.
Back to Caeser. The entire plot of the film is basically this, Caeser was born with increased intelligence due to his mother being a test animal for Will's Alzheimer's cure, and the first half of the film is basically "Here is the life of Will and Caeser", since it takes place over the course of eight years, and it's nice, it shows that despite being an animal, he is very intelligent and manages to fit in with human society. However, his animalistic instincts kick in eventually and he is taken in by the authorities and treated like an animal, which he is not familiar with. He is forced to use his increased intelligence to cause an uprising amongst the apes he is kept with in order to free them all from captivity and live in the wild where he believes they belong. It's all very compelling stuff, helped by Andy Serkis doing an incredible job acting the balance between intelligence and sapience and animalistic instincts and tendencies, I especially like the fact that he does not learn to speak until late in the film, really helping the acting tell the story using only nonverbals from its main character.
Moving onto the special effects, special effects in my opinion,are finally reaching a point where you wouldn't know they were being used unless you were told. A good example of this occurs recently in the Social Network, where a pair of twins are neither greenscreened not played by actual twins, and you can't tell because of how seamless it is. This is also used to good effect in Captain America with Skinny Steve and Strong Steve, and finally in this episode, where you could really believe that all the Apes are just perplexingly well trained Animal Actors.
One final point I noted about the movie was both in its favour and against it. In the original Planet of the Apes, the morality of the Humans and the Apes were more black and white, the central message of the film (Let me state this is my interpretation.) was that humans were evil, thoughtless beings who would nearly destroy their planet by accident, and that the Apes were better heralds of the Planet, but just as evil due to their treatment of Charlton Heston's character. In this film, none of the events are explicitly the fault of either party, the Apes, while intelligent were acting through instinct and meant no harm to any of the Humans, and the Humans themselves, while treating the Apes much like they treated the humans in the first film, were at least trying to cure Alzheimer's and did indeed grant sapience to the Apes, if unintentionally. The film is more realistic in the portrayal of the morality of the two factions, being less black and white and more grey and grey.
And while this definitely improves the film and makes the actions of the characters much easier to swallow, it also (Again, my personal opinion.) undermines the message of the original film, because whereas the original film strongly implied that the humans were definitely responsible for the near destruction of their planet and that the Apes were somewhat justified in their treatment of them. The events of the film, looking back, make that film seem like one big misunderstanding.
Overall though, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes the Official Film of the film the Prequel the Phantom Menace was a very compelling drama, disappointing if the trailer tricked you into thinking that it was an action film perhaps, and you are definitely required to have watched either the original or Tim Burton's remake to catch all the references (Though I imagine even those who haven't would get the hillarious "You damn dirty Ape" reference.), but overall, it was a good film. Not a good film for getting into the series however, I would suggest watching the originals before watching this. Especially since the biggest failing of the film is that the very premise of the film assumes that you don't care about the original's twist ending being spoiled.
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