Simon Dillon reviews the film

Essentially a reworking of 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (the fourth sequel to the original), Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a very pleasant surprise in that it is intelligent, exciting, emotional and above all satisfying.

The plot involves chemist Will Rodman (James Franco), hard at work looking for an Alzheimer's cure by experimenting on chimps. He adopts the offspring of a chimpanzee who was given a breakthrough drug that had unfortunate side effects, and soon said offspring - later named Caesar - shows signs of phenomenal intelligence. Frustrated at how the company he works for are refusing tests on human subjects, Will tests a second breakthrough drug on his father who is suffering with Alzheimer's. He appears to recover, but in the meantime Caesar is becoming not just more intelligent, but more emotionally attached to the family he will never truly be a part of, and therefore more dangerous.

Performances are all good not just from the leads but from a supporting cast which includes John Lithgow, David Oyelowo, Brian Cox, Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter), Freido Pinto (from Slumdog Millionaire) and David Hewlett (Rodney from TV's Stargate). The latter has a small but pivotal role which doesn't become altogether clear until the end credits begin to roll. However, the real man-of-the-match in the cast is Andy Serkis, who gives an extraordinary motion capture performance as Caesar.

The all but seamless CG special effects are really something in this movie, not just in big action sequences such as the riveting Golden Gate bridge finale (when it becomes chillingly apparent how two dimensional thinking spells doom for the humans), but also in the smaller emotional moments, some of which are genuinely heart-wrenching. Director Rupert Wyatt stages some hugely imaginative shots, my favourite of which was the extraordinary image of leaves suddenly falling from trees at the height of summer. People look up incredulously to see what is causing this to find countless escaped apes swinging above them in the branches.

As well as being a first-rate story, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver's screenplay is also quite thought provoking on a moral/spiritual level. It has the usual warnings about playing God that one would expect to find, but these are peripheral to the more central message about the dangers of rushing ahead with good intentions (in this case, Will's entirely understandable desire to cure his father) when those with the power are only interested in a favourable financial outcome. By the time Will realises the potentially lethal dangers of the drugs he is developing and finally puts the brakes on his experiments, the company pushes ahead regardless, in spite of his warnings.

For my money, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was the most interesting of the sequels to the peerless original film. But it was hamstrung by a compromised ending (changed after bad test previews), censorship problems (the MPAA objected to some of the violence), and the lack of a decent budget. By contrast, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has a decent budget, no censorship challenges, and a very satisfactory ending that keeps with the bleak tone of the earlier films but wisely doesn't try to introduce an unnecessary twist in an attempt to top the spine-freezing final act twist of the original (unlike Tim Burton's ill conceived reworking of the first Planet of the Apes in 2001).

All things considered, if Thor was the best film of this year's blockbuster season for family audiences, then Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the best film of this year's blockbuster season for more adult audiences. It doesn't top the original, but it comes much closer to it than any of the previous sequels.