Return of the Son of the Revenge of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes

There's too many "of thes" in this film.

So, James Franco is a scientist who works in a science company owned by a guy who hasn't the faintest idea how science or companies work. He's working on a compound that can encourage tissue regeneration in the brain, and his tests on chimps show several years of good results. They're showing off the product to some investors, when one of the chimps gets a bit cross, escapes, and scares some investors. So the whole product has to be destroyed, all the science thrown away, all the chimps put down and the chemical that obviously works has to be re-researched from scratch. No, I don't know why either. Me, I'd have given the product a new name and relaunched it three months later.

Anyway, while they're killing off all the chimps, we find that the reason the chimp who went ape (see what I did there?) went ape was because she had just given birth to a baby, and was protecting it. Which is why she broke out of her cage and went on a rampage, leaving the baby in the cage. Obviously. Not sure whether I'm more surprised that the chimp got pregnant while kept caged on her own, or that the scientists working with her failed to notice that she was pregnant. Anyway, this baby chimp is rescued and taken home by James Franco, where he raises it, finding that it has better than human equivalent cognitive abilities in some areas. The chimp is named Caesar, and as he grows, he finds that the world isn't fair, that he's always going to be treated like an animal despite his human level intelligence, and things kind of progress from there, with Caesar's dissatisfaction with his lot and James Franco's desperation to get the drug working so he can treat his father (John Lithgow) who's rapidly declining with Alzheimers.

This is a film with plenty of good SF ideas in it. Most notably, if you made an animal more intelligent, what would it be? Not a human, but not an animal either. Which of course leads to the more general animal rights question, how should we treat animals in general, even if they haven't the intelligence to present a coherent objection to their treatment. And that's the good bit of the film; we're with Caesar all the way through, and his treatment at the hands of humans is pretty outrageous, while being reasonably believable. The CGI creating Caesar is pretty impressive, and you can see Andy Serkis's performance shine through. (Having said that, I don't think he actually looks much like a chimp.)

Sadly, where it all goes wrong is towards the end, as the ideas run out before the film does, and we're treated to a scene of a gang of apes attempting to cross a bridge to freedom, and a bunch of humans trying to stop them with a roadblock. It's a pretty embarrassingly dumb scene, and it breaks the spell pretty much, altering the stance of the human protagonists from merely thoughtless, to actively idiotic.

Worthy of note, is the sad, sad fate of Tom Felton, who after being one of the best known characters in fiction for the last ten years or so, is now reduced to the status of a guy who shovels primate shit for a living. He even ends up losing a wand duel with a chimpanzee at one point. Tragic.