When I first saw the trailer for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” this summer’s reboot of the late 1960s franchise, I thought, “Who’s that actor who looks so much like James Franco?” After all, surely Franco, whose acting chops appear critically acclaimed films like “Milk” and “127 Hours,” would scoff at leading this flick, a pretty silly premise taken from a pretty hokey movie, artificially inflated with pretty excessive digital effects. Franco is getting a PhD from Yale, people. This is a man who acted in a movie about cutting his own arm off. This is a man who once attended four colleges at once for various creative enterprises. This is a
serious actor. What the hell is he doing in a goofy remake featuring CGI apes and summer- blockbuster gas explosions?

And yet, once I recovered from the realization that yeah, that dreamy James Dean jawline on the screen was undeniably Franco’s, I could see how it worked. “Rise” is a movie that doesn’t try to overextend itself, that sets its scope clearly and well and delivers a solid, affecting performance. Even moments of wince-inducing cheese are forgiven by the time the credits roll, and one-dimensional characters are simply flattened into irrelevancy as the apes begin to take over both the world and the film.

Franco plays a moralistic but shortsighted genetic scientist determined to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. He’s found a promising viral strain that heightens the intelligence of one of the lab chimps, nicknamed “Bright Eyes” for the eerie green flecks that appear in her irises. When Bright Eyes flies into a rage in the amazingly low-security lab, interrupting an important financial meeting, she’s shot and killed — and leaves behind a baby who’s inherited her intelligence.

Franco brings the baby, Caesar (played via motion-capture wizardry by Andy Serkis, the man behind Peter Jackson’s King Kong), home to his Alzheimer’s-affected father (John Lithgow). As Caesar grows from adorable tot to sullen teen to a complex and thoughtful adulthood, he begins to seek his own identity in a place that clearly delineates between animals and humans. In the meantime, Franco’s own work, administering Caesar’s wonder drug to his father, starts to implode.

The extended climax is a terrifically paced stream of science gone berserk, as storylines multiply and then, chillingly, humans begin to fade. As Caesar leads a colony of apes in scenes that channel political revolutionaries, what happens to Franco and his father becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Sure, there are some missteps. Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy from the “Harry Potter” series) plays a sadistic animal caretaker whose evoking of the famous “damn dirty ape” line induces more groans than it does delighted cries of recognition. But the movie is cleverer than it lets on: Echoes of the swine-flu panic reverberate through some scenes, and Marxist ideas about oppressed masses in others. Ultimately, the film finds its own message, surprisingly profound, about the incongruent worlds of well-meaning humans losing control of a technology
developed out of humanity, not greed; and of the apes, who complicate definitions of rights and liberties. Unlike recent visually stunning blockbusters (say, “Avatar”), “Rise” backs up its beautiful setpieces and graphics with xpressiveness and challenging, even disturbing, ideas.

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