Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes - 2011 - 4 Stars

Actors:  James Franco, Freida Pinto
Director:  Rupert Wyatt

Take off your intellect.  No, not all of it, I don't want to see that - just some of it.  You know what I want to see gone, that part that deduces plot holes, incongruities, the part that says 'That would never happen!', the 21st century sad equivalent to Archimedes' 'Eureka!'  I can't tell you how many times in Brooklyn I saw people running down the street naked yelling 'I've successfully deconstructed this film!'.

So that's off, right?  Okay, then settle in for an excellent action film, one which goes far away from the original concepts of the Planet of the Apes, depicting the 'Rise' of said planet.

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

There's a sequence in an ape holding facility that either does a marvelous job with CGI depicting the difficulty animals have with freeing themselves from the captor/captive relationship, or re-imagines the entire history of Prison Film tropes from Rules of the Game to The Shawshank Redemption, putting them in the wordless faces of CGI-generated apes.