Waiting for the Apes to Rise

I haven't seen all the Planet of Apes movies. Seen the original. Saw the remake. And now seen the reboot.

This movie is just like Deep Blue Sea. In that the lead scientist decides to create Alzheimer drugs by experimenting on animals. Apes in this case. Unlike that other movie, in this movie, he is single handedly responsible for creating the Rise of the Apes and making it the Planet of the Apes. Well done.

But the big problem is that the movie takes over an hour and a half to do this. I don't care how good the CGI animal acting is (and it's not that good because you are always aware you are watching a CGI animal acting), this movie just takes too long pondering its own navel and saying 'look at how the Apes are rising... really, really slowly... see just how slow this Rise is... wooh! Rising like anything! Any minute now... maybe...' We get the emotional core of 'man treat monkey bad, so monkey takes revenge' because we have seen that similar plot time and again. Despite being about a different animal, this isn't new, so I just fail to engage. And it's not like the human performances are any more moving. James Franco isn't exciting, and John Lithgow isn't doing anything worth noticing.

I haven't seen many of the Ape movies, and this isn't making me want to catch up on that gap.

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