Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt’s 105 minute film opens with a researcher testing an Alzheimer’s drug that lifts the intelligence of a chimpanzee named Caesar, and spends most of its length preparing an uprising rather than staging one. The shape is not what the marketing promised. The first half is a domestic drama built around John Lithgow’s ailing father, with almost no action until Caesar is locked in a sanctuary. The real hinge is not a battle but a single spoken word, and until that moment the lead performance carries the film without dialogue. Viewers used to being told things out loud will spend a long stretch reading a face instead. The technical boundary matters too. Weta Digital built every ape digitally rather than in suits or with live animals, and roughly fifteen hundred effects shots were previsualised, yet the camera that could see capture markers in daylight was deployed mainly for the Golden Gate Bridge sequence. The rest was captured on a stage, which is why the film feels enclosed. Tom Felton’s guard is named Dodge Landon after the astronauts of the 1968 original. A ninety three million dollar budget returned over 481 million worldwide. Not for you if you want the catastrophe itself: the pandemic spreads in a map animation under the closing credits.