Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Directed by Rupert Wyatt

(PG-13)

***

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This blockbuster gets it right, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Smart and fun, “it’s a model summer diversion that entertains without insulting your intelligence.” James Franco plays a scientist whose experiments with an Alzheimer’s drug produce a superintelligent ape who leads a revolt among abused primates. As the apes rise up, they’re “both terrifying and sympathetic,” said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. Unfortunately, “the cast of human actors is uniformly weak,” with Franco reprising his detached performance as an Oscars host and Frieda Pinto as his underwritten love interest. But who needs humans when Andy Serkis is playing the head ape? said Richard Corliss in Time. Having channeled Gollum for Lord of the Rings, Serkis again plays a digitized character and “gives a performance so nuanced and powerful” that it might just garner the first Oscar awarded to an actor who is never seen on screen. Still, this is an action film first, and its climactic showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge is a “triumph of visual effects” and the perfect finishing note for “a work of high, often thrilling, popular art.”