Rise of the Planet of the Apes

One of the teasers for next year's Oscar nominations may be the handling of Andy Serkis. The Armenian-English master of "motion capture" acting gave LOTR a star turn as Gollum, and also worked wonders for director Peter Jackson in the title role of King Kong. He has now assured the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes through his representation of Caesar, the apes' leader. Will it earn him a Best Supporting Actor nomination? Or will New Zealand's WETA (LOTR, King Kong and Avatar) CGI technicians, who transformed his movements and facial expressions into convincing pixels, win all the glory?

Serkis, who provided the motions "captured" by the technicians, will probably have to wait for any Oscar reward until the reboot of the franchise ends. In any case, John Lithgow is a surer bet this time as an Oscar nominee (it would be his third) for his finely-gauged cameo as a retired piano teacher afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease.

His son, a medical researcher (James Franco, nicely under-acting), discovers a virus that repairs brain cells, and secretly improves his father's. His authorised test victim is a female chimpanzee, who runs riot and is shot before her secret day-old baby boy is discovered. The fact that none of the preceding sentence's script aroused instant disbelief and chuckles in the cinema audience is a tribute to sophomore Brit director Duncan Wyatt. His breakneck pace, quick cuts and smooth editing flattered the story, ably driven forward too by brash old-fashioned symphonic music composed by Scotsman Patrick (Bridget Jones' Diary, Gosford Park) Doyle, most-awarded recently for the Goblet of Fire instalment of HP.

Other supporting cameos, with deliberately understated nastiness, show ape-abusers who are heartless (Scot Brian Cox), vicious (Tom Felton, best known so far as HP's Draco Malfoy) and exploitative (UK TV actor English-Nigerian David Oyelowo). Niceness is served luke-warm by Bombay-born Frieda Slumdog Millionaire Pinto as Franco's characterless love interest, and Canadian Tyler Labine as his agonised research pal. The key focal point, literally in terms of close-ups on his highly expressive frowns and green-tinted eyes, is Caesar, the orphaned chimp nurtured secretly by Franco and Pinto for eight years (another totally implausible plot detail). He gains superhuman intelligence and potential world dominion (to come in the next episode, hinted at during the end credits, via NYC).

Caesar's new-found simian allies are a mixed bunch, almost laughably so for an over-jowled ludicrously dreadlocked lump (Maurice), a "circus orangutan" who understands sign language (like Caesar), and is a CGI creation based on an actress's captured motions. She and most other human-simian models clearly don't have the expertise and fluent body and skin linguistics of Serkis. His Caesar is a marvel to behold, amazingly moving and masterful, while the CGI experts have a field day with the army of apes using brute force to attack San Francisco.

The DVD's deleted scenes or commentary may reveal what happened in up to 10 minutes of screen time cut from the original reported length. One loose end that slips past shows Caesar reacting to the sight of a dead female ape referred to previously by humans; if the original screenplay had included an aborted love interest for Caesar, its deletion was wise.

Maybe the commentary will also note and explain the decisions to cast a black actor as the profit-driven boss of the medical research company, call him Dr Jacobs and have him ceremonially killed by a facially-deformed bonobo he'd experimented on. The non-pc aspects of the storyline were probably camouflaged by casting an English actor as Jacobs.

The original 1963 novel (La Planete des singes) by Frenchman Pierre Boulle had been first adapted for Hollywood in 1968, starring Charlton Heston. Four sequels followed, as did an inconsequential Tim Burton version in 2001. Remarkably, this reboot's writer-producers (Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) had no significant track record, and top dogs at the Dune and Fox production companies must be tickled pink (richly) by the success of their risky investment of almost US$100 million in the project, together with the equally risky choice of young outsider Duncan Wyatt as the director.

His first full-length directorial feature had been back in the UK: The Escapist (2008), which he co-wrote. Its cast included Brian Cox (who'd also appeared in the second of Wyatt's previous two short films). It needs to be sought out, to see what qualities in it prompted Hollywood to give the young Brit such a pricey responsibility. He succeeded, brilliantly in commercial terms and very credibly in technical terms; his film and the re-born franchise deliver pleasing big-screen cinema, a live-action cartoon whose illogic doesn't diminish its entertainment value.