you're so apes

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes:
I don't like talking animals and babies. They creep me out. Thankfully there is very minimal (oops, spoiler) ape-talking in this. There is however plenty of ace acting by Andy Serkis as Caesar. He is able to make his motion-capture ape character feel flesh and blood, as he did for Gollum. This is again another origin story, in which James Franco is a research scientist who raises Caesar and super-pretty Freida Pinto is a vet and his girlfriend (James Franco's girlfriend, not Caesar's). Caesar ends up being taken away from Franco and locked up in a facility tended by Tom Felton, who unfortunately has not left Draco behind but instead of waving his evil wand at Harry Potter, is now waving his stun baton sadistically at Caesar and his fellow imprisoned apes. This leads to the uprising, and super-intelligent apes running amok all over San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The motion-capture special effect is rather amazing and seamless. You really don't think for a second that James Franco and others are not really interacting with real, well-trained apes. I however think I like the set-up of the story more than the pay-off. I mean, when it all ends, it's not so much an uprising as it is just an escape. An uprising would be that the apes take over the White House and Congress (or has that happened already?). Well, I guess that's what sequels are for. Regardless, the lesson learned here is that you should always be nice to animals because you never know when they have been injected by some intelligence-enhancing drugs. B